The works of Michel de Montaigne

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

THE UBUAKY

UNIVBRSITY OF CAUTORNlA

U)S ANGELK8

THE WORKS OF
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

With Notes, Life and Letters
Complete in Ten Volumes

^^^^i^##

EMERSON EDITION

Ten Hundred and Fifty Copies
have been printed

Number.

ATS

ESSAYS OF

MONTAiaJSTE

TRANSLATED BY

CHARLES COTTON

REVISED BY

WILLIAM CAREW HAZLETT

VOLUME FIVE

New York

EDWIN C. HILL

MCMX

COPYBIOHT 1910 BT

EDWIN C. HILL

Library

lb4Z
E5H3

CONTENTS

Apology for Baimond de Sebonde (continued).

Tolnme T

1005771

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Circe. From Painting by Henri

Motte Frontispiece

Ulysses and the Sirens. From
Painting by Leon-Auguste-
Adolphe Belly Page 28

God and the Mortal. From Paint-
ing by Jean Le Comte-DuNony . . " 90

Judgment of Midas. From Painting

by Theodor Grosse ** 228

Volnme V

ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE

APOLOGY FOE EAIMOND DE SEBONDE

{CoDtiDued.)

AS TO magnanimity, it will be hard to give
a better instance of this than in the example
of the great dog sent to Alexander the Great
from India. They first brought him a stag to
encounter, next a boar, and after that a bear;
all these he slighted, and disdained to stir
from his place; but when he saw a lion, he
immediately roused himself, evidently mani-
festing that he declared that alone worthy
to enter the lists with him. As to what con-
cerns repentance and the acknowledgment of
faults, 'tis reported of an elephant, that hav-
ing, in the impetuosity of his rage, killed
his keeper, he fell into so extreme a sorrow
that he would never after eat, but starved
himself to death. And as to clemency, 'tis
said of a tiger, the most inhuman of all beasts,
that a kid having been put in to him, he suf-
fered two days' hunger rather than hurt it,
and on the third day broke the cage he was

11

12 MONTAIGNE

shut up in, to go seek elsewhere for prey, not
choosing to fall upon the kid, his friend and
guest. And as to the laws of familiarity and
agreement, formed by converse, it commonly
occurs that we bring up cats, dogs, and hares
tame together.

But that which seamen experimentally
know, and particularly in the Sicilian sea, of
the quality of the halcyons, surpasses all
human thought: of what kind of animal has
nature so highly honored the hatching, birth,
and production? The poets, indeed, say that
the Island of Delos, which before was a float-
ing island, was fixed for the service of
Latona's lying-in; but the gods ordered that
the whole ocean should be stayed, made stable
and smoothed, without waves, without wind
or rain, whilst the halcyon lays her eggs,
which is just about the Solstice, the shortest
day of the year, so that, by this halcyon's
privilege, we have seven days and seven
nights in the very heart of winter, wherein
we may sail without danger. Their females
never have to do with any other male but
their own, whom they always accompany
(without ever forsaking him) all their lives;

MONTAIGNE 13

if he happen to be weak and broken with age,
they take him upon their shoulders, carry him
from place to place, and serve him till death.
But the most inquisitive into the secrets of
nature could never yet arrive at the knowl-
edge of the marvellous fabric wherewith the
halcyon builds the nest for her little ones,
nor guess at the matter. Plutarch, who had
seen and handled many of them, thinks it is
the bones of some fish which she joins and
binds together, interlacing them some length-
wise and others across, and adding ribs and
hoops in such a manner that she forms, at
last, a round vessel fit to launch, which being
done, and the building finished, she carries it
to the wash of the beach, where the sea beat-
ing gently against it, shows her where she
is to mend what is not well jointed and knit,
and where better to fortify the seams that
are leaky and that open at the beating of the
waves; and, on the contrary, what is well
built and has had the due finishing, the beat-
ing of the waves so closes and binds together
that it is not to be broken or cracked by
blows, either of stone or iron, without very
much ado. And that which is still more to be

14 MONTAIGNE

admired is the proportion and figure of the
cavity within, which is composed and pro-
portioned after such a manner as not pos-
sibly to receive or admit any other thing
than the bird that built it; for to anything
else it is so impenetrable, close, and shut, that
nothing can enter, not so much as the water
of the sea. This is a very clear description
of this building, and borrowed from a very
good hand ; and yet methinks it does not give
us sufficient light into the difficulty of this
architecture. Now, from what vanity can
it proceed to place lower than ourselves, and
disdainfully to interpret effects that we can
neither imitate nor comprehend?

To pursue a little further this equality and
correspondence betwixt us and beasts: the
privilege our soul so much glorifies herself
upon of bringing all things she conceives to
her own condition, of stripping all things that
come to her of their mortal and corporal
qualities, of ordering and placing the things
she conceives worthy her taking notice of,
divesting them of their corruptible qualities,
and making them lay aside length, breadth,
depth, weight, color, smell, roughness,

MONTAIGNE 15

smoothness, hardness, softness, and all sensi-
ble incidents, as mean and superfluous vest-
ments, to accommodate them to her own im-
mortal and spiritual condition: the Paris, just
as Eome and Paris, that I have in my soul,
the Paris that I imagine, I imagine and con-
ceive it without greatness and without place,
without stone, without plaster, without wood:
this very same privilege, I say, seems to be
evidently in beasts: for a horse, accustomed
to trumpets, the rattle of musket-shot and the
bustle of battles, whom we see start and
tremble in his sleep stretched upon his litter,
as if he were in fight, it is certain that he con-
ceives in his soul the beat of drum without
noise, an army without arms and without
body: —

''You shall see strong horses, however,
when they lie down in sleep, often sweat, and
snort, and seem as if, with all their force, they
were striving to win the race."

The hare that a harrier imagines in his
dream, after which we see him so pant whilst
he sleeps, so stretch out his tail, shake his
legs, and perfectly represent all the motions

16 MONTAIGNE

of his course, is a hare without skin and with-
out bones: —

* ' Hounds often in their quiet rest suddenly
throw out their legs and bark, and breathe
quick and short, as if they were in full chase
upon a burning scent : nay, being waked, pur-
sue visionary stags, as if they had them in
real view, till at last, discovering the mis-
take, they return to themselves.'*

We often observe the watchdogs growl in
their dreams and afterward bark out, and
start up on a sudden, as if they perceived
some stranger at hand : this stranger, that
their soul discerns, is a spiritual and imper-
ceptible man, without dimension, without
color, and without being: —

** Often our caressing house-dogs, shaking
slumber from their eyes, will rise up sud-
denly, as if they see strange faces/*

As to beauty of the body, before I proceed
any further, I would know whether or not
we are agreed about the description. 'Tis
likely we do not well know what beauty is in
nature and in general, since to human and our

MONTAIGNE 17,

own beauty we give so many diverse forms,
of which were there any natural rule and
prescription we should know it in common,
as we do the heat of the fire. But we fancy
its forms according to our own appetite and
liking: —

*'The Belgic complexion is base in con-
trast to a Eoman face. ' '

Indians paint it black and tawny, with great
swollen lips, big flat noses, and load the carti-
lage betwixt the nostrils with great rings of
gold to make it hang down to the mouth; as
also the nether lip with great hoops, en-
riched with jewels, that weigh them down to
fall upon the chin, it being with them a
special giiace to show their teeth even below
the roots. In Peru, the- greatest ears are the
most beautiful, and they stretch them out as
far as they can by art; and a man, now living,
says that he has seen in an Eastern nation
this care of enlarging them in so great re-
pute, and the ear laden with such ponderous
jewels, that he did with great ease put his
arm, sleeve and all, through the bore of an
ear. There are, elsewhere, nations that take

18 MONTAIGNE

great care to blacken their teeth, and hate to
see them white; elsewhere, people that paint
them red. Not only in Biscay, but in other
places, the women are reputed more beautiful
for having their heads shaved, and this, more-
over, in certain frozen countries, as Pliny re-
ports. The Mexican women reckon among
beauties a low forehead, and though they
shave all other parts, they nourish hair on
the forehead and increase it by art, and have
large teats in such great reputation, that they
make boast to give their children suck over
their shoulders. We should paint deformity
so. The Italians fashion beauty gross and
massive: the Spaniards, gaunt and slender;
and among us one makes it white, another
brown: one soft and delicate, another strong
and vigorous; one will have his mistress soft
and gentle, another haughty and majestic.
Just as the preference in beauty is given by
Plato to the spherical figure, the Epicureans
give it to the pyramidal or the square, and
cannot swallow a god in the form of a ball.
But, be it how it will, nature has no more
privileged us above her common laws in this
than in the rest; and if we will judge our-

MONTAIGNE 19

selves aright, we shall find that if there be
some animals less favored in this than we,
there are others, and in great number, that
are more so: —

**Many animals surpass us in beauty, »»

even of our terrestrial compatriots; for, as to
those of the sea, setting the figure aside,
which cannot fall into any manner of com-
parison, being so wholly another thing, in
color, cleanness, smoothness, and disposition,
we sufficiently give place to them; and no
less, in all qualities, to the aerial. And this
prerogative that the poets make such a
mighty matter of, our erect stature, looking
towards heaven, our original: —

** Whereas other animals bow their prone
looks to the earth, he gave it to men to look
erect, to behold the heavenly arch,*'

is merely poetical; for there are several little
beasts that have their sight absolutely turned
towards heaven; and I find the countenance
of camels and ostriches much higher raised,
and more erect than ours. What animals

20 MONTAIGNE

have not their faces forward and in front,
and do not look just as we do, and do not in
their natural posture discover as much of
heaven and earth as man? And what quali-
ties of our bodily constitution, in Plato and
Cicero, may not indifferently serve a
thousand sorts of beasts? Those that most
resemble us are the ugliest and most abject
of all the herd; for, as to outward appearance
and form of visage, such are the baboons and
monkeys : —

'*How like to us is that basest of beasts,
the ape?"

and, for the internal and vital parts, the hog.
In earnest, when I imagine man stark naked,
even that sex that seems to have the greatest
share of beauty, his defects, natural subjec-
tions, and imperfections, I find that we have
more reason than any other animal to cover
ourselves. We are readily to be excused for
borrowing of those creatures to which nature
has in this been kinder than to us, to trick
ourselves with their beauties and hide our-
selves under their spoils — their wool,
feathers, hair, silk. Let us observe, as to the

MONTAIGNE 21

rest, that man is the sole animal whose nudi-
ties offend his own companions, and the only
one who, in his natural actions, withdraws
and hides himself from his own kind. And
really, 'tis also an effect worth considera-
tion, that they, who are masters in the trade,
prescribe as a remedy for amorous passions
the full and free view of the body a man de-
sires; so that, to cool his ardor, there needs no
more but full liberty to see and contemplate
what he loves: —

"He that in full ardor has disclosed to him
the secret parts of his mistress in open view,
flags in his hot career:'^

and although this recipe may, peradventure,
proceed from a refined and cold humor, it is,
notwithstanding, a very great sign of our
weakness, that use and acquaintance should
disgust us with one another.

It is not modesty so much as cunning and
prudence, that makes our ladies so circum-
spect in refusing us admittance to their
closets, before they are painted and tricked
up for public view: —

''Nor does this escape our beauties, inso-

22 MONTAIGNE

much that they with such care behind the
scenes remove all those defects that may
check the flame of their lovers:**

whereas in several animals there is nothing
that we do not love, and that does not please
our senses; so that from their very excre-
ments we not only extract wherewith to
heighten onr sauces, but also our richest
ornaments and perfumes. This discourse re-
flects upon none but the ordinary sort of
women, and is not so sacrilegious as to seek
to comprehend those divine, supernatural,
and extraordinary beauties, whom we oc-
casionally see shining amongst us like stars
under a corporeal and terrestrial veil.

As to the rest, the very share that we al-
low to beasts of the bounty of nature, by our
own confession, is very much to their ad-
vantage: we attribute to ourselves imaginary
and fantastic goods, future and absent goods,
for which human capacity cannot, of herself,
be responsible; or goods that we falsely at-
tribute to ourselves by the license of opinion,
as reason, knowledge, and honor; and leave
to them, for their share, essential, manage-
able, and palpable goods, as peace, repose.

MONTAIGNE 23

security, innocence, and health: health, I say,
the fairest and richest present that nature
can make us. Insomuch! that philosophy,
even the Stoic, is so bold as to say that
Heraclitus and Pherecides, could they have
exchanged their wisdom for health, and had
delivered themselves, the one of his dropsy
and the other of the lice disease that tor-
mented him, by the bargain they had done
well. By which they set a still greater value
upon wisdom, comparing and putting it in
the balance with health, than they do in this
other proposition, which is also theirs: they
say that if Circe had presented to Ulysses
two potions, the one to make a fool become
a wise man, and the other to make a wise
man become a fool, Ulysses ought rather to
have chosen the last than to consent that
Circe should change his human figure into
that of a beast; and say that wisdom itself
would have spoken to him after this manner:
''Forsake me, let me alone, rather than lodge
me under the figure and body of an ass."
How, then, will the philosophers abandon
this great and divine wisdom for this corp-
oreal and terrestrial covering? it is then not

24 MONTAIGNE

by reason, by discourse, by the soul, that we
excel beasts; 'tis by our beauty, our fair com-
plexion, our fine symmetry of parts, for which
we must quit our intelligence, our prudence,
and all the rest. Well, I accept this frank
and free confession: certainly, they knew
that those parts upon which we so much value
ourselves are no other than vain fancy. If
beasts, then, had all the virtue, knowledge,
wisdom, and Stoical perfection, they would
still be beasts, and would not be comparable
to man, miserable, wicked, insensate man.
For, in fine, whatever is not as we are is
nothing worth; and God Himself to procure
esteem amongst us must put Himself into that
shape, as we shall show anon: by which it
appears that it is not upon any true ground
of reason, but by a foolish pride and vain
opinion, that we prefer ourselves before other
animals, and separate ourselves from their
condition and society.

But, to return to what I was upon before,
we have for our part inconstancy, irresolu-
tion, incertitude, sorrow, superstition, solici-
tude about things to come even after we shall
be no more, ambition, avarice, jealousy, envy,
irregular, frantic, and untamable appetites.

MONTAIGNE 25

war, lying, disloyalty, detraction, and curio-
sity. Doubtless, we have strangely overpaid
this fine reason upon which we so much
glorify ourselves, and this capacity of judg-
ing and knowing, if we have bought it at the
price of this infinite number of passions to
which we are eternally subject: unless we
shall yet think fit, as Socrates does, to add
this notable prerogative above beasts, that
whereas nature has prescribed to them cer-
tain seasons and limits for the delights of
Venus, she has given us the reins at all hours
and all seasons: —

**As it falls out that wine seldom benefits
the sick man, and very often injures him, it
is better not to give them any at all than out
of hope of an uncertain benefit to incur a
sure mischief: so I know not whether it had
not been better for mankind that this quick
motion, this acumen of imagination, this
subtlety, that we call reason, had not been
given to man at all; since what harms many,
and benefits few, had better have not been
bestowed, than bestowed with so prodigal a
hand."

Of what advantage can we conceive the
knowledge of so many things was to Varro
and Aristotle? Did it exempt them from

26 MONTAIGNE

human inconveniences? Were they by it
freed from the accidents that lie heavy upon
the shoulders of a porter? Did they extract
from their logic any consolation for the gout?
or, from knowing that this humor is lodged
in the joints, did they feel it the less? Did
they enter into composition with death by
knowing that some nations rejoice at his ap-
proach? or with cuckoldry, by knowing that
in some part of the world wives are in com-
mon ? On the contrary, having been reputed
the greatest men for knowledge, the one
amongst the Romans and the other amongst
the Greeks, and in a time when learning most
flourished, we have not heard, nevertheless,
that they had any particular excellence in
their lives: nay, the Greek had enough to do
to clear himself from some notable blemishes
in his. Have we observed that pleasure and
health have had a better relish with him who
understands astrology and grammar than
with others?

**Do the veins of the illiterate swell less
freely?^'

and shame and poverty less troublesome? .

MONTAIGNE 27

**Thou shalt be free from disease and in-
firmity, and avoid care and sorrow; and thy
life shall be prolonged, and with better
days.'*

I have known in my time a hundred artisans,
a hundred laborers, wiser and more happy
than the rectors of the imiversity, and whom
I had much rather have resembled. Learn-
ing, methinks, has its place amongst the
necessary things of life, as glory, nobility,
dignity, or, at the most, as beauty, riches,
and such other qualities, which, indeed, are
useful to it; but remotely and more by
fantasy than by nature. We need scarcely
more offices, rules, and laws of living in our
society than cranes and emmets do in theirs;
and yet we see that these live very regularly
without erudition. If man were wise, he
would take the true value of everything ac-
cording as it was most useful and proper to
his life. Whoever will number us by our
actions and deportments, will find many more
excellent men amongst the ignorant than
among the learned : aye, in all sorts of virtue.
The old Rome seems to me to have been of
much greater value, both for peace and war,

28 MONTAIGNE

than that learned Rome that ruined itself;
and though all the rest should be equal, yet
integrity and innocence would remain to the
ancients, for they inhabit singularly well with
simplicity. But I will leave this discourse
that would lead me farther than I am willing
to follow; and shall only say this farther:
*tis only humility and submission that can
make a complete good man. We are not to
leave to each man's own judgment the knowl-
edge of his duty; we are to prescribe it to
him, and not suffer him to choose it at his
own discretion: otherwise, according to the
imbecility and infinite variety of our reasons
and opinions, we should at last forge for our-
selves duties that would (as Epicurus says)
enjoin us to eat one another.

The first law that ever God gave to man
was a law of pure obedience: it was a com-
mandment naked and simple, wherein man
had nothing to inquire after or to dispute,
forasmuch as to obey is the proper office of
a rational soul, acknowledging a heavenly
superior and benefactor. From obedience
and submission spring all other virtues, as

MONTAIGNE 29

all sin does from self-opinion. And, on the
contrary, the first temptation that by the
devil was offered to human nature, its first
poison, insinuated itself by the promises that
were made to us of knowledge and wisdom: —

*'Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and
evil."

And the Syrens, in Homer, to allure Ulysses
and draw him within the danger of their
snares, offered to give him knowledge. The
plague of man is the opinion of wisdom; and
for this reason it is that ignorance is so
recommended to us by our religion, as
proper to faith and obedience: —

**Take heed lest any man deceive you by
philosophy and vain seductions according to
the first principles of the world.'*

There is in this a general consent amongst
all sects of philosophers, that the sovereign
good consists in the tranquillity of the soul
and body: but where shall we find it? —

**He that is wise is one degree inferior

30 MONTAIGNE

only to Jove; free, honored, fair, in short, a
king of kings; above all, in health, unless
when the phlegm is troublesome.*'

It seems, in truth, that nature, for the con-
solation of our miserable and wretched state,
has only given us presumption for our in-
heritance; 'tis, as Epictetus says, ''that man
has nothing properly his own, but the use
of his opinions;" we have nothing but wind
and smoke for our portion. The gods have
health in essence, says philosophy, and sick-
ness in intelligence; man, on the contrary,
possesses his goods by fancy, his ills in es-
sence. We have had reason to magnify the
power of our imagination, for all our goods
are only in dream. Hear this poor calamitous
animal huff: "There is nothing," says Cicero,
*'so charming as the occupation of letters; of
those letters, I say, by means whereof the
infinity of things, the immense grandeur of
nature, the heavens, even in this world, the
earth, and the seas are discovered to us. 'Tis
they that have taught us religion, modera-
tion, the grandeur of courage, and that have
rescued our souls from obscurity, to make her
see all things, high, low, first, middle, last,

MONTAIGNE 31

and 'tis they that furnish us wherewith to
live happily and well, and conduct us to pass
over our lives without displeasure and with-
out offence." Does not this man seem to
speak of the condition of the ever-living and
almighty God! Yet, as to the effect, a
thousand little country-women have lived
lives more equal, more sweet and constant
than his: —

'"That god, great Memmus, was a god in-
deed, who first found out that rationale of
life which is now called wisdom; and who by
such art removed life from its tempests and
darkness into so calm and clear a light."

Here are very fine, very brave words; but a
very light accident put this same man's un-
derstanding in a worse condition that that
of the meanest shepherd, notwithstanding
this instructing God, this divine wisdom. Of
the same stamp of impudence is the promise
of Democritus's book, *'I am going to speak
of all things;" and that foolish title that
Aristotle prefixes to one of his, "of the
mortal gods," and the judgment of Chrysip-
pus, "that Dion was as virtuous as God;"

32 MONTAIGNE

and my friend Seneca does indeed acknowl-
edge that God has given him life, but that to
live well is his own, conformably with this
other: —

** We truly glory in our virtue, which would
not be if we had it as a gift from God and not
from ourselves;**

this is also Seneca's saying, ''That the wise
man has fortitude equal with God; but in
human frailty, wherein he surpasses Him.'*
There is nothing so ordinary as to meet with
sallies of the like temerity; there is none of
us who takes so much offence to see himself
equalled to God, as he does to see himself
undervalued by being ranked with other ani-
mals; so much more are we jealous of our
own interest, than of that of our Creator.
But we must trample under foot this foolish
vanity, and briskly and boldly shake the
ridiculous foundations upon which these
false opinions are based. So long as man
shall believe he has any means and power of
himself, he will never acknowledge what he
owes to his Master; his eggs shall always be
chickens, as the saying is; we must therefore

MONTAIGNE 33

strip him to his shirt. Let us see some notable
example of the effect of his philosophy.
Posidonius, being tormented with a disease so
painful as made him writhe his arms and
gnash his teeth, thought he sufficiently
baffled the pain by crying out against it:
' ' Thou dost exercise thy malice to much pur-
pose; I will not confess that thou art an
evil." He is as sensible of the pain as my
lacquey ; but he mightily values himself upon
bridling his tongue at least, and restraining
it within the laws of his sect: —

*'It did not belong to him, vaunting in
words, to give way to the thing itself."

Arcesilaus, being ill of the gout, and Car-
neades coming to see him, was returning,
troubled at his condition; the other calling
back and showing him his feet and then his
breast: ''There is nothing come from these
hither, ' ' said he. This has somewhat a better
grace, for he feels himself in pain, and would
be disengaged from it; but his heart, notwith-
standing, is not conquered or enfeebled by it ;
the other stands more obstinately to his
work, but, I fear, rather verbally than really.

34 MONTAIGNE

And Dionysius Heracleotes, afflicted with a
vehement smarting in his eyes, was reduced
to quit these stoical resolutions. But, though
knowledge could in effect do, as they say,
and could blunt the point and dull the edge of
the misfortunes that attend us, what does
she more than what ignorance does more
simply and evidently? The philosopher
Pyrrho, being at sea in very great danger by
reason of a mighty storm, presented nothing
to those who were with him to imitate in this
extremity but the security of a hog they had
on board, that was looking at the tempest
quite unconcerned. Philosophy, when she
has said all she can, refers us at last to the
example of a wrestler or a muleteer, in which
sort of people we commonly observe much
less apprehension of death or sense of pain
and other infirmities, and more endurance,
than ever knowledge furnished any one with
who was not bom to those infirmities, and of
himself prepared for them by a natural habit.
"What is the cause that we make incisions and
cut the tender limbs of an infant, and those
of a horse, more easily than our own, but
ignorance only I How many has mere force

MONTAIGNE 35

of imagination made ill. We often see men
cause themselves to be let blood, purged,
and physicked, to be cured of diseases they
only feel in opinion. When real infirmities
fail us, knowledge lends us hers: that color,
this complexion, portends some catarrhous
defluxion; this hot season threatens us with
a fever: this breach in the lifeline of your
left hand gives you notice of some near and
notable indisposition: and at last it roundly
attacks health itself, saying, this sprightli-
ness and vigor of youth cannot continue in
this posture, there must be blood taken, and
the fever abated, lest it turn to your preju-
dice. Compare the life of a man subject to
such imaginations with that of a laborer who
suffers himself to be led by his natural ap-
petite, measuring things only by the present
sense, without knowledge and without prog-
nostics— who is only ill when he is ill;
whereas the other has the stone in his soul
before he has it in his bladder; as if it were
not time enough to suffer evil when it shall
come, he must anticipate it by fancy and run
to meet it. What I say of physic may gen-
erally serve as example in other sciences: and

36 MONTAIGNE

hence is derived that ancient opinion of the
philosophers, who placed the sovereign good
in discerning the weakness of our judgment.
My ignorance affords me as mnch occasion
of hope as of fear; and having no other rule
of my health than that of the examples of
others, and of events I see elsewhere upon
the like occasion, I find of all sorts, and rely
upon the comparisons that are most favor-
able to me. I receive health with open arms,
free, full, and entire, and by so much the more
whet my appetite to enjoy it, by how much it
is at present less ordinary and more rare: so
far am I from troubling its repose and sweet-
ness, with the bitterness of a new and con-
strained manner of living. Beasts sufficiently
show us how much the agitation of the soul
brings infirmities and diseases upon us. That
which is told us of the people of Brazil, that
they never die but of old age, is attributed
to the serenity and tranquillity of the air
they live in ; but I attribute it to the serenity
and tranquillity of their soul, free from all
passion, thought, or employments, continu-
ous or unpleasing, as people that pass over
their lives in an admirable simplicity and

MONTAIGNE 37

ignorance, without letters, without law, with-
out king, or any manner of religion. Whence
comes this which we find by experience, that
the coarsest and most rough-hewn clowns
are the most able and the most to be desired
in amorous performances, and that the love
of a muleteer often renders itself more ac-
ceptable than that of a gentleman, if it be not
that the agitation of the soul in the latter
disturbs his corporal ability, dissolves and
tires it, as it also troubles and tires itself!
What more usually puts the soul beside her-
self, and throws her into madness, than her
own promptness, vigor, and agility — in short,
her own proper force? Of what is the most
subtle folly made, but of the most subtle wis-
dom? As great friendships spring from great
enmities, and vigorous healths from mortal
diseases: so from the rare and quick agita-
tions of our souls proceed the most wonderful
and wildest frenzies; *tis but a half turn of
the toe from the one to the other:

"Great wits to madness, sure, are near

allied.
And thin partitions do their bounds divide. ' ^

38 MONTAIGNE

La the actions of madmen, we see how nearly
madness resembles the most vigorous opera-
tions of the soul. Who does not know how in-
discernible the difference is betwixt madness
and the gay flights of a sprightly soul, and
the effects of a supreme and extraordinary
virtue? Plato says, that melancholic persons
are the most capable of discipline and the
most excellent ; nor, indeed, is there in any so
great a propension to madness. Infinite wits
are ruined by their own proper force
and suppleness: to what a condition,
through his own excitable fancy, has
one of the most judicious, ingenious,
and best-informed to the ancient, and
true poesy, of any of the Italian poets lately
fallen! Has he not great obligation to this
fatal vivacity, to this light that has blinded
him? to this exact and subtle apprehension
of reason, that has put him beside his reason,
to his close and laborious search after the
sciences, that has reduced him to stupidity, to
that rare aptitude to the exercises of the soul,
that has rendered him without exercise
and without soul. I had more chagrin,
if possible, than compassion, to see him at

MONTAIGNE 39

Ferrara in so pitiful a condition surviving
himself, forgetting both himself and his
works, which, without his knowledge, though
before his face, have been published, de-
formed and incorrect.

Would you have a man sound, would you
have him regular, and in a steady and secure
posture? muffle him up in the shades of
stupidity and sloth. We must be made beasts
to be made wise, and hoodwinked before we
can govern ourselves. And if one shall tell
me that the advantage of having a cold and
blunted sense of pain and other evils, brings
this disadvantage along with it, to render us,
consequently, less eager and sensible also in
the fruition of goods and pleasures; this is
true: but the misery of our condition is such
that we have not so much to enjoy as to avoid,
and that the extremest pleasure does not af-
fect us to the degree that a light grief does : —

"Men are less sensitive to pleasure than to
pain. ' *

We are not so sensible of the most perfect
health, as we are of the least sickness: —

* * The body is vexed with a little sting that

40 MONTAIGNE

scarcely penetrates the skin, while the most
perfect health is not perceived. This only
pleases me, that neither side nor foot is
plagued; except these, scarce any one can
tell, whether he's in health or no."

Our well-being is nothing but the privation
of ill-being; and this is the reason why that
sect of philosophers which sets the greatest
value upon pleasure, has fixed it chiefly in
insensibility of pain. To be free from ill is
the greatest good that man can hope for, as
Ennius says: —

*'Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali;"

for that very tickling and sting which are in
certain pleasures, and that seem to raise us
above simple health and insensibility: that
active, moving, and, I know not how, itching
and biting pleasure, even that very pleasure
itself looks to nothing but apathy as its
mark. The lust, that carries us headlong to
women's embraces, is directed to no other
end but only to cure the torment of our
ardent and furious desires, and only requires
to be glutted and laid at rest, and delivered
from that fever; and so of the rest. I say

MONTAIGNE 41

then that, if simplicity conducts us to a state
free from evil, it leads us to a very happy
one, according to our condition. And yet we
are not to imagine it so leaden an insensi-
bility as to be totally without sense: for
Grantor had very good reason to controvert
the insensibility of Epicurus, if founded so
deep that the very first attack and birth of
evils were not to be perceived. **I do not
approve such an insensibility as is neither
possible nor to be desired: I am well con-
tent not to be sick; but, if I am, I would
know that I am so; and if a caustic be ap-
plied or incisions made in any part, I would
feel them." In truth, whoever would take
away the knowledge and sense of evil, would,
at the same time, eradicate the sense of
pleasure, and, in short, annihilate man him-
self:—

"An insensibility, that is not to be pur-
chased but at the price of the humanity of
the soul and of stupidity in the body.'*

Evil appertains to man in its turn; neither is
pain always to be avoided, nor pleasure
always pursued.

42 MONTAIGNE

Tis a great advantage to the honor of
ignorance that knowledge itself throws us
into its arms when she ifinds herself puzzled
to fortify us against the weight of evils; she
is constrained to come to this composition,
to give us the reins, and permit us to fly into
the lap of the other, Mid to shelter ourselves
under her protection from the strokes and
injuries of fortune. For what else is her
meaning when she instructs us to divert our
thoughts from the ills that press upon us,
and entertain them with the meditation of
pleasures past and gone; to comfort ourselves
in present ajfflictions with the remembrance of
fled delights, and to call to our succor a van-
ished satisfaction, to oppose it to what lies
heavy upon usT—

**The way to dissipate present grief is to
recall to contemplation past pleasures,'*

if it be not that where power fails her she
will supply it with policy, and make use of a
supple trip, when force of limbs will not serve
the turn? For not only to a philosopher, but
to any man in his right wits, when he has
upon him the thirst of a burning fever, what

MONTAIGNE 43

satisfaction can it be to remember the
pleasure of drinking Greek wine? it would
rather be to make matters worse: —

' ' The remembrance of pleasure doubles the
sense of present pain."

Of the same stamp is the other counsel that
philosophy gives; only to remember past
happiness and to forget the troubles we have
xmdergone; as if we had the science of
oblivion in our power: 'tis a counsel for
which we are never a straw the better: —

"The memory of past toils is sweet/'

How? Is philosophy, that should arm me to
contend with fortune, and steel my courage
to trample all human adversities under foot,
arrived at this degree of cowardice, to make
me hide my head and save myself by these
pitiful and ridiculous shifts? for the memory
presents to us not what we choose but what
it pleases; nay, there is nothing that so much
imprints anything in our memory as a de-
sire to forget it: and 'tis a sure way to re-
tain and keep anything safe in the soul, to
solicit her to lose it. This is false: —

44 MONTAIGNE

**And it is placed in our power to burj, as
it were, in a perpetual oblivion adverse ac-
cidents, and to retain a pleasant and delight-
ful memory of our successes;**

and this is true: —

**I even remember what I would not; but I
cannot forget what I would.**

And whose counsel is this ? his : —

**Who alone dares to profess himself a wise
man (Epicurus).*'

**Who all mankind surpassed in genius,
effacing them as the rising sun puts out the
stars.**

To empty and disfumish the memory, is not
this the true and proper way to ignorance? —

** Ignorance is but a dull remedy for evils.**

We find several other like precepts whereby
we are permitted to borrow from the vulgar
frivolous appearances where reason, in all
her vivacity and vigor, cannot do the feat,
provided they administer satisfaction and

MONTAIGNE 45

comfort; where they cannot cure the wound,
they are content to palliate and benumb it.
I believe they will not deny me this, that if
they could establish order and constancy in
a state of life that could maintain itself in
ease and pleasure by some debility of judg-
ment, they would accept it: —

"I will begin to drink and strew flowers,
and will suffer to be thought mad/'

There would be a great many philosophers
of Lycas' mind: this man being otherwise
of very regular manners, living quietly and
contentedly in his family, and not failing in
any office of his duty, either towards his own
people or strangers, and very carefully pre-
serving himself from hurtful things, was
nevertheless, by some distemper in his brain,
possessed with a conceit that he was per-
petually in the theatre, viewing the several
entertainments, and enjoying the amuse-
ments and the shows and the best comedies
in the world; and being cured by the physi-
cians of his frenzy, had much ado to forbear
endeavoring by process of law to compel them

46 MONTAIGNE

to restore him again to his pleasing imagi
nations: —

**By heaven! yon have killed me, my
friends, not saved me, he said; my dear de-
lights and pleasing error by my retumin<5
sense are taken from me:'*

with a madness like that of Thrasyllus, son
of Pythodorus, who had grown to believe
that all the ships that weighed anchor from
the port of Piraeus and that came into the
haven, only made their voyages for his profit,
congratulating himself on their Jiappy navi-
gation, and receiving them with the greatest
joy. His brother Crito having caused him to
be restored to his better understanding, he
infinitely regretted that sort of condition
wherein he had lived with so much delight
and free from all anxiety. 'Tis according to
the old Greek verse, ''that there is a great
deal of convenience in not being so
prudent : ' ' —

And Ecclesiastes, *'In much wisdom is much
grief; and he that increaseth knowledge in-
creaseth sorrow."

MONTAIGNE 47

Even that to which philosophy consents in
general, that last remedy which she applies
to all sorts of necessities, to put an end to
the life we are not able to endure: —

**Does it please! bear it. Not please? go
out, how thou wilt. Does grief prick thee?
nay, if it stab thee too: if thou art weapon-
less, present thy throat: if covered with the
arms of Vulcan, that is fortitude, resist it.''

and these words so used in the Greek festi-
vals : —

^*Let him drink or go;"

that sound better upon the tongue of a Gas-
con, who naturally changes the b into v, than
upon that of Cicero: —

''If thou canst not live right, give place
to those that can; thou hast eaten, drunk,
amused thyself to thy content; 'tis time to
make departure, lest, being overdosed, the
young ones first laugh at thee, and then turn
thee out."

What is it other than a confession of his im-
potency, and a retreating not only to ignor-

48 MONTAIGNE

ance, to be there in safety, but even to stupid-
ity, insensibility, and nonentity? —

"So soon as, through age, Democritus
found a manifest decadence in his mind, he
himself went to meet death."

'Tis what Antisthenes said, ''That a man
must either make provision of sense to un-
derstand, or of a halter to hang himself;"
and what Chrysippus alleged upon this say-
ing of the poet Tyrtaeus, ''Or to arrive at
virtue or at death:" and Crates said, "That
love could be cured by hunger, if not by time;
and if a man disliked these two remedies, by
a rope." That Sextius of whom both Seneca
and Plutarch speak with so high an en-
comium, having applied himself (all other
things set aside) to the study of philosophy,
resolved to throw himself into the sea, find-
ing the progress of his studies too tedious
and slow. He ran to find death, since he
could not overtake knowledge. These are
the words of the law upon this subject: "If,
peradventure, some great inconvenience hap-
pen, for which there is no remedy, the haven
is near, and a man may save himself by

MONTAIGNE 49

swimming out of his body, as out of a leaky
skiff; for 'tis tlie fear of dying, and not the
love of life, that ties the fool to his body."

As life renders itself by simplicity more
pleasant, so, also, more innocent and better,
as I was saying before. The simple and
ignorant, says St. Paul, raise themselves up
to heaven, and take possession of it; and we,
with all our knowledge, plunge ourselves into
the infernal abyss. I am neither swayed by
Valentinian, a professed enemy to all knowl-
edge and literature; nor by Licinus, both
Eoman emperors, who called them the poison
and pest of all politic government; nor by
Mahomet, who, as I have heard, interdicted
all manner of learning to his followers, but
the example of the great Lycurgus and his
authority, with the reverence of the divine
Lacedaemonian policy, so great, so admirable,
and so long flourishing in virtue and happi-
ness without any institution or practice of
letters, ought, certainly, to be of very great
weight. Such as return from the new world
discovered by the Spaniards in our fathers*
days can testify to us how much more hon-
estly and regularly those nations live, with-

50 MONTAIGNE

out magistrate and without laws, than ours
do, where there are more officers and laws
than there are other sorts of men, or than
there are lawsuits: —

**Her lap was full of writs and of citations,

Of process of actions and arrest.
Of bills, of answers, and of replications.

In Courts of Delegates and of RequeMs,
To grieve the simple with great vexations:
She had resorting to her as her guests,
Attending on her circuits and her journeys,
Scriveners and clerks, and lawyers and at-
torneys.'^

It was what a Roman senator said of the
later ages, that their predecessors' breath
stank of garlic, but their stomachs were per-
fumed with a good conscience; and that on
the contrary, those of his time were all sweet
odor without, but stank within of all sorts
of vices; that is to say, as I interpret it, that
they abounded with learning and eloquence,
but were very defective in moral honesty.
Incivility, ignorance, simplicity, roughness,
are the natural companions of innocence;
curiosity, subtlety, and knowledge bring
malice in their train: humility, fear, obedi-

MONTAIGNE 51

ence, and affability, which are the principal
things that support and maintain human
society, require an empty and docile soul,
and little presuming upon itself. Christians
have a special knowledge how natural and
original an evil curiosity is in man : the thirst
of knowledge, and the desire to become more
wise, was the first ruin of human kind, and
the way by which it precipitated itself into
eternal damnation. Pride is his ruin and cor-
ruption: *tis pride that diverts him from the
common path, and makes him embrace novel-
ties, and rather choose to be head of a troop,
lost and wandering in the path of perdition,
to be tutor and teacher of error and lies, than
to be a disciple in the school of truth, suffer-
ing himself to be led and guided by the hand
of another, in the right and beaten road.
'Tis, peradventure, the meaning of this old
Greek saying: ''That superstition follows
pride and obeys it as if it were a father." 0
presumption, how much dost thou hinder us!
After that Socrates was told that the god
of wisdom had attributed to him the title of
sage, he was astonished at it, and searching
and examining himself throughout, could find

52 MONTAIGNE

no foundation for this divine decree : lie knew
others as just, temperate, valiant, and learned
as himself, and more eloquent, handsome, and
more profitable to their country than he. At
last, he concluded that he was not distin-
guished from others nor wise, but only be-
cause he did not think himself so, and that
his god considered the self-opinion of knowl-
edge and wisdom as a singular stupidity of
man; and that his best doctrine was the doc-
trine of ignorance, and simplicity his best
wisdom. The sacred word declares those
miserable who have an opinion of themselves :
**Dust and ashes,** says it to such, ''what
hast thou wherein to glorify thyself!'* And
in another place, "God has made man like
unto a shadow,'* of which who can judge,
when by the removing of the light it shall
be vanished? It is nothing but of us.

Our strength is so far from being able to
comprehend the divine height, that of the
works of our Creator those best bear His
mark and are best His which we the least
xmderstand. To meet with an incredible
thing, is an occasion with Christians to be-
lieve. It is all the more reason that it is

MONTAIGNE 53

against human reason; if it were according
to reason, it would no longer be a miracle;
if it had an example, it would be no longer
a singular thing: —

**God is better known by not knowing.**

says St. Augustin; and Tacitus:

"It is more holy and reverend to believe
the works of the gods than to know them;'*

and Plato thinks there is something of im-
piety in inquiring too curiously into God,
the world, and the first causes of things : — •

"To find out the parent of the world, is
very hard : and when found out, to reveal him
in common, is unlawful,"

says Cicero. We pronounce, indeed, power,
truth, justice, which are words that signify
some great thing; but that thing we neither
see nor conceive. We say that God fears,
that God is angry, that God loves: —

"Speaking of things immortal in mortal
language,'*

54 MONTAIGNE

which are all agitations and emotions that
cannot be in God, according to our form, nor
can we imagine it, according to His. It only
belongs to God to know Himself, and to in-
terpret His own works; and He does it, in
our language, to stoop and descend to us
who grovel upon the earth. How can Prud-
ence, which is the choice betwixt good and
evil, be properly attributed to Him, whom
no evil can touch? How the reason and in-
telligence, which we make use of, so as by
obscure to arrive at apparent things,
seeing that nothing is obscure to Him!
and justice, which distributes to every
one what appertains to Him, a thing
created by the society and community
of men: how is that in God! how temperance?
how the moderation of corporal pleasures,
that have no place in the divinity ? Fortitude
to support pain, labor, and dangers as little
appertains to Him as the rest, these three
things having no access to Him: for which
reason Aristotle holds Him equally exempt
from grace and anger: —

"He can be affected neither with favor

, MONTAIGNE 55

nor indignation, because both those are the
effects of frailty/'

The participation we have in the knowl-
edge of truth, such as it is, is not acquired
by our own force: God has sufficiently given
us to understand that by the testimony He
has chosen out of the common .people, simple
and ignorant men, whom He has been
pleased to employ to instruct us in His ad-
mirable secrets. Our faith is not of our own
acquiring; 'tis purely the gift of another's
bounty; 'tis not by meditation or by virtue
of our own understanding that we have ac-
quired our religion, but by foreign authority
and command ; the weakness of our judgment
more assists us than force, and our blind-
ness more than our clearness of sight; 'tis
rather by the mediation of our ignorance
than of our knowledge that we know anything
of the divine Wisdom. 'Tis no wonder if
our natural and earthly means cannot con-
ceive that supernatural and heavenly knowl-
edge: let us bring nothing of our own, but
obedience and subjection; for, as it is writ-
ten, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and will bring to nothing the understanding

56 MONTAIGNE

of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where
is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this
worid? Hath not God made foolish the wis-
dom of this worid? For after that in the wis-
dom of God the worid by wisdom knew not
God, it pleased God by the foolishness of
preaching to save them that believe.'*

Should I examine finally, whether it be in
the power of man to find out that which he
seeks, and if that quest wherein he has busied
himself so many ages has enriched him with
any new force or any solid truth: I believe
he will confess, if he speaks from his con-
science, that all he has got by so long an
inquisition is only to have learned to know
his own weakness. We have only by long
study confirmed and verified the natural
ignorance we were in before. The same has
fallen out to men truly wise which befall
ears of com ; they shoot and raise their heads
high and pert, whilst empty; but when full
and swollen with grain in maturity, begin to
flag and droop; so, men having tried and
sounded all things, and having found in that
accumulation of knowledge and provision of
so many various things, nothing massive and

MONTAIGNE 57

firm, nothing but vanity, have quitted their
presumption and acknowledged their natural
condition. 'Tis what Velleius reproaches
Cotta with and Cicero, that what they had
learned of Philo was that they had learned
nothing. Pherecydes, one of the seven sages,
writing to Thales upon his deathbed: "I
have," said he, "given order to my people,
after my interment, to carry my writings to
thee. K they please thee and the other sages,
publish them; if not, suppress them. They
contain no certainty with which I myself am
satisfied. I pretend not to know the truth
or to attain unto it; I rather open than dis-
cover things." The wisest man that ever
was, being asked what he knew, made
answer; he knew this, that he knew nothing.
By which he verified what has been said, that
the greatest part of what we know is the least
of what we do not know, that is to say, that
even what we think we know, is but a piece,
and a very little one, of our ignorance. We
know things in dreams, says Plato, and are
ignorant of them in reality:

"Almost all the ancients declare, that noth-

58 MONTAIGNE

ing is perceived, nothing can be ascertained:
that the senses are narrow, men's minds
weak, the course of life short.'*

And of Cicero himself, who stood indebted
to his learning for all he was, Valerius says,
that in his old age he began to disrelish let-
ters, and when most occupied with them, it
was in independence of any party: following
what he thought probable, now in one sect
and then in another, evermore wavering
under the doubts of the Academy: —

'*I am to speak, but so that I affirm noth-
ing: I will inquire into all things, for the most
part in doubt, and distrustful of myself."

I should have too fine a game should I con-
sider man in his common way of living and
in gross: and yet I might do it by his own
rule, who judges truth, not by the weight,
but by the number of votes. Let us leave
there the people : —

"Who waking snore! whose life is almost
death, though living and seeing;"

who neither feel nor judge themselves, and

MONTAIGNE 59

let most of their natural faculties lie idle. I
will take man in his highest state. Let us
consider him in that small number of men,
excellent and culled out from the rest, who
having been endowed with a grand and
special natural force, have, moreover, hard-
ened and whetted it by care, study, and art,
and raised it to the highest pitch of wisdom
to which it can possibly arrive. They have
adjusted their souls in all senses and all
biases; have propped and supported them
with all foreign helps proper for them, and
enriched and adorned them with all they
could borrow for their advantage, both within
and without the world: these are they in
whom is placed the supremest height to
which human nature can attain. They have
regulated the world with polities and laws;
they have instructed it with arts and sciences,
and further instructed it by the example of
their admirable conduct. I shall make ac-
count of none but such men as these, their
testimony and experience; let us examine how
far they have proceeded, and on what they
reposed their surest hold; the maladies and
defects that we shall find amongst these men.

60 MONTAIGNE

the rest of the world may very boldly also
declare to be their own.

Whoever goes in search of anything, must
come to this, either to say that he has found
it, or that it is not to be found, or that he is
yet upon the quest. All philosophy is divided
into these three kinds: her design is to seek
out truth, knowledge, and certainty. The
Peripatetics, Epicureans, Stoics, and others,
have thought they had found it: these have
established the sciences that we have, and
have treated of them as of certainties. Clito-
machus, Cameades, and the Academics, have
despaired in their quest, and concluded that
truth could not be conceived by our capacity;
the result with these is all weakness and
human ignorance; this sect has had the most
and most noble followers. Pyrrho and other
sceptics or epichists, whose dogmas were
held by many of the ancients to have been
taken from Homer, the seven sages, Archilo-
cus, Euripides, Zeno, Democritus, and Xeno-
phanes, say, that they are yet upon the search
of truth: these conclude that the others who
think they have found it out are infinitely
deceived; and that it is too daring a vanity in

MONTAIGNE 61

the second sort to determine that human rea-
son is not able to attain unto it; for to estab-
lish the standard of our power, to know and
judge the difficulty of things, is a great and
extreme knowledge, of which they doubt
whether man is capable: —

**If any one says that nothing is known, he
also does not know whether it is knowable
that he knows nothing."

The ignorance that knows itself, judges, and
condemns itself, is not an absolute ignorance :
to be this, it must be ignorant of itself; so
that the profession of the Pyrrhonians is to
waver, doubt, and inquire, not to make them-
selves sure of or responsible to themselves for
anything. Of the three actions of the soul,
the imaginative, the appetitive, and the con-
senting, they receive the two first; the last
they hold ambiguous, without inclination or
approbation, one way or the other, however
slight. Zeno represented by motion his imagi-
nation of these divisions of the faculties of
the soul; an open and expanded hand signi-
fied Appearance: a hand half shut and the
fingers a little bent. Consent: a clutched fist,

62 MONTAIGNE

Comprehension: when with the left hand he
yet pressed the fist closer, Knowledge. Now
this situation of their judgment, upright and
inflexible, receiving all objects without appli-
cation or consent, led them to their Ataraxy,
which is a condition of life, peaceable, tem-
perate, and exempt from the agitations we
receive by the impression of the opinion and
knowledge that we think we have of things;
from which spring fear, avarice, envy, im-
moderate desires, ambition, pride, supersti-
tion, 4ove of novelty, rebellion, disobedience,
obstinacy, and the greatest part of bodily
ills ; nay, by this they exempt themselves from
the jealousy of their discipline: for they de-
bate after a very gentle manner; they fear no
rejoinder in their disputes: when they afl&rm
that heavy things descend, they would be
sorry to be believed, and love to be contra-
dicted, to engender doubt and suspense of
judgment, which is their end. They only put
out their propositions to contend with those
they think we have in our belief. If you take
their arguments, they will as readily maintain
the contrary; 'tis all one to them; they have
no choice. If you maintain that snow is black.

MONTAIGNE '63

they will argue, on the contrary, that it is
white ; if you say it is neither the one nor the
other, they will maintain that *tis both. If
you hold, as of certain judgment, that you
know nothing of it, they will maintain that
you do: yet, and if, by an affirmative axiom,
you assure them that you doubt, they will
argue against you that you doubt not, or that
you cannot judge and determine that you
doubt. And by this extremity of doubt, which
jostles itself, they separate and divide them-
selves from many opinions, even of those that
have several ways maintained doubt and
ignorance. Why shall not they be allowed,
say they, as well as the dogmatists, one to
say green, another yellow; why may not they
also doubt? Can anything be proposed to us
to grant or deny which it shall not be per-
mitted to consider as ambiguous! And where
others are carried away, either by the custom
of their country or by the instruction of
parents, or by accident, as by a tempest, with-
out judging and without choice, nay, and for
the most part before the age of discretion, to
such or such an opinion, to the sect of the
Stoics or Epicureans, to which they are en-

64 MONTAIGNE

slaved and fast bound, as to a thing they can-
not shake off: —

*'To whatever discipline they are carried,
as by a tempest, they cleave to it as to a
rock;*'

why shall not these likewise be permitted to
maintain their liberty and to consider things
without obligation or slavery?

**In this more unconstrained and free, that
they have the full power of judging."

Is it not of some advantage to be disengaged
from the necessity that curbs others? is it
not better to remain in suspense than to en-
tangle one's self in the innumerable errors
that human fancy has produced? is it not
much better to suspend one's persuasion than
to intermeddle with these wrangling and sedi-
tious divisions ? What shall I choose ? * ' What
you please, provided you do choose." A very
foolish answer, but one, nevertheless, to which
all the dogmatists seem to point; by which we
are not permitted to be ignorant of that of
which we are ignorant. Take the most emi-
nent side, that of the greatest reputation;

MONTAIGNE 65

it will never be so sure, that to defend it yon
will not be forced to attack and contend with
a hundred and a hundred adversaries; is it
not better to keep out of this hurly-burly?
You are permitted to embrace, with as much
zeal as honor and life, Aristotle's opinion of
the immortality of the soul, and to give the
lie to Plato thereupon; and shall they be in-
terdicted from doubting it? If it be lawful
for Panaetius to maintain his opinion about
augury, dreams, oracles, vaticinations, of
which things the Stoics make no doubt at all,
why may not a wise man dare to do the same
in all things which this man dared to do in
those he had learned of his masters, and es-
tablished by the common consent of the school
whereof he is a professor and a member? If
it be a child that judges, he knows not what
it is : if a sage, he is prepossessed. They have
reserved for themselves a marvellous ad-
vantage in battle, having eased them-
selves of the care of defence; if you
strike them, 'tis no matter, provided they
strike too; and they make everything serve
their purpose; if they overcome, your argu-
ment is lame; if you, theirs: if they fail, they

66 MONTAIGNE

verify ignorance; if you fail, you do it: if they
prove that nothing is known, it is well; if they
cannot prove it, 'tis equally well: —

**So that, when equal reasons happen, pro
and con in the same matter, the judgment
may, on both sides, be more easily sus-
pended : ' '

and they pretend to find out with much
greater facility why a thing is false than why
it is true; that which is not, than that which
is; and what they do not believe, than what
they do. Their way of speaking is, **I affirm
nothing: it is no more so than so, or than
either one nor t'other: I understand it not.
Appearances are everywhere equal: the law
of speaking, pro or con, is the same: noth-
ing seems true that may not seem false."
Their sacramental word is lein that is to
say, **I sustain, I do not budge." This is the
burden of their song, and others of like sub-
stance. The effect of it is a pure, entire, per-
fect, and absolute suspension of the judg-
ment: they make use of their reason to in-
quire and debate, but not to fix and determine.
Whoever shall imagine a perpetual confes-

MONTAIGNE 67

sion of ignorance, a judgment without bias
or inclination, upon any occasion whatever,
conceives a true idea of Pyrrhonism. I ex-
press this fancy as well as I can, by reason
that many find it hard to conceive; and the
authors themselves represent it somewhat
variously and obscurely.

As to what concerns the actions of life,
they are in this of the common fashion; they
yield and lend themselves to the natural in-
clinations, to the power and impulse of pas-
sions, to the constitutions of laws and cus-
toms, and to the tradition of arts: —

**For God chose not to have us know, but
only use, those things. ' '

They suffer their ordinary actions to be
guided by these things without any dispute
or judgment; for which reason I cannot well
reconcile with this argument what is said of
Pyrrho; they represent him stupid and im-
movable, leading a kind of savage and un-
sociable life, getting in the way of the jostle
of carts, going upon the edge of precipices,
and refusing to accommodate himself to the
laws. This is to exaggerate his discipline;
he would never make himself a stick or a

68 MONTAIGNE

stone, he would show himself a living man,
discoursing, reasoning, enjoying all natural
conveniences and pleasures, employing and
making use of all his corporal and
spiritual faculties in rule and reason;
the fantastic, imaginary, and false privi-
leges that man has usurped of lord-
ing it, of ordaining and establishing, be
utterly renounced and quitted. There is no
sect but is constrained to permit its sage to
follow many things not comprehended, per-
ceived, or consented to in its rules, if he
means to live: and if he goes to sea he follows
that design, not knowing whether it will be
useful to him or no, and relies upon the tight-
ness of the vessel, the experience of the pilot,
the fitness of the season: probable circum-
stances only, according to which he is bound
to go, and suffer himself to be governed by
appearances, provided there be no express
and manifest contrariety in them. He has a
body, he has a soul; the senses push him, the
mind spurs him on; and although he does not
find in himself this proper and singular mark
of judging, nor perceive that he ought not to
engage his consent, considering that there

MONTAIGNE 69

may be some false, equal to these true appear-
ances, yet does he not for all that fail of car-
rying on the offices of his life fully, freely,
and conveniently. How many arts are there
that profess to consist more in conjecture
than in knowledge, that decide not upon true
and false, and only follow that which seems
true I There is, say they, true and false, and
we have in us wherewith to seek it, but not
to fix it when we touch it. We are much more
prudent in letting ourselves be carried away
by the swing of the world without inquisition;
a soul clear from prejudice has a marvellous
advance towards tranquillity and repose.
Men who judge and control their judges never
duly submit to them.

How much more docile and easy to be gov-
erned, both in the laws of religion and civil
polity, are simple and incurious minds, than
those over-vigilant and pedagoguish wits that
will still be prating of divine and human
causes? There is nothing in human inven-
tion that carries so great a show of likeli-
hood and utility as this; this presents man,
naked and empty, confessing his natural
weakness, fit to receive some foreign force

70 MONTAIGNE

from above; unfurnished of human, and there-
fore more apt to receive divine knowledge;
setting aside his own judgment to make more
room for faith; not misbelieving, nor estab-
lishing any doctrine against the laws and
common observances; humble, obedient, dis-
ciplinable, studious, a sworn enemy of heresy,
and consequently freeing himself from vain
and irreligious opinions introduced by false
sects; *tis a carte blanche prepared to re-
ceive from the finger of God such forms as
He shall please to write upon it. The more
we resign and commit ourselves to God, and
the more we renounce ourselves, of the
greater value are we. "Take in good part,"
says Ecclesiastes, **the things that present
themselves to thee, as they seem and taste
from hand to mouth; the rest is out of thy
knowledge:** —

"The Lord knoweth the thoughts of men,
that they are but vanity."

Thus we see that, of the three general sects
of philosophy, two make open profession of
doubt and ignorance; and in that of the Dog-
matists, which in the third, it is easy to dis-

MONTAIGNE 71

cover that tlie greatest part of them only as-
sume a face of assurance that they may have
the better air; they have not so much thought
to establish any certainty for us, as to show
us how far they have proceeded in their
search of truth: —

''Which the learned rather feign than
know. ' '

Timaeus, having to instruct Socrates in what
he knew of the gods, the world, and men,
proposes to speak to him as a man to a man,
and that it is sufficient if his reasons are as
probable as those of another; for that exact
reasons were neither in his nor in any other
mortal hand. Which one of his followers
has thus imitated: —

**I will, as well as I am able, explain; yet
not as Pythius Apollo, that what I say should
be fixed and certain, but like an ordinary
man that follows probabilities by conjec-
ture;'*

and this upon the natural and common sub-
ject of the contempt of death: he has else-
where translated from the very words of
Plato:—

72 MONTAIGNE

*'If perchance, discoursing of the nature
of gods and the world's original, we cannot
do it quite as we desire, it will be no wonder.
For it is just you should remember that both
I who speak, and you who are to judge, are
men; that if probable things are delivered,
you may require no more."

Aristotle ordinarily heaps up a great number
of other opinions and beliefs, to compare
them with his own, and to let us see how much
he has gone beyond them, and how much
nearer he approaches to probability: for truth
is not to be judged by the authority and testi-
mony of others: which made Epicurus religi-
ously avoid quoting them in his writings.
This is the prince of all dogmatists, and yet
we are told by him that much knowledge ad-
ministers to many occasion of doubting the
more; we see him sometimes purposely so
shroud and muffle up himself in thick and in-
extricable obscurity, that we know not what
use to make of his advice; it is, in fact, a
Pyrrhonism under a resolutive form. Hear
Cicero's protestation, who expounds to us
another's fancy by his own: —

**They who desire to know what we think

MONTAIGNE 73

of everything, are more inquisitive than is
necessary. This practice in philosophy, of
disputing against everything, and of abso-
lutely concluding nothing, begun by Socrates,
repeated by Arcesilaus, and confirmed by
Cameades, has continued in use even to our
own time. We are those who declare that
there is a mixture of things false amongst all
that are true, with such a resemblance to one
another, that there is in them no certain mark
to direct us, either to judge or assent. ' '

Why has not Aristotle only, but most of the
philosophers, affected diflficulty, if not to em-
phasize the vanity of the subject and amuse
the curiosity of our mind, by giving it this
bare, hollow bone to pick! Clitomachus
afl&rmed that he could never discover, by
Cameades' writings, what opinion he was of.
This was what made Epicurus affect to be
abstruse, and that procured Heraclitus to be
sumamed Obscure. Difl&culty is a coin the
learned make use of, like jugglers, to con-
ceal the inanity of their art, and which human
sottishness easily takes for current pay: —

**He got a great name among the weak-
witted, especially by reason of the obscurity

74 MONTAIGNE

of his language; for fools admire and love
rather such things as are wrapped in dubious
phrase."

Cicero reprehends some of his friends for
giving more of their time to the study of
astrology, law, logic, and geometry, than they
were worth, saying that they were by these
diverted from the duties of life, more profit-
able and more worthy studies; the Cyrenaic
philosophers equally despised natural philo-
sophy and logic. Zeno, in the very beginning
of the Books of the Commonwealth, declared
all the liberal arts of no use. Chrysippus said
that what Plato and Aristotle had written
concerning logic, they had only done in sport
and by way of exercise, and could not be-
lieve that they spoke in earnest of so vain a
thing; Plutarch says the same of metaphysics;
and Epicurus would have said as much of
rhetoric, grammar, poesy, mathematics, and,
natural philosophy excepted, of all the
sciences, and Socrates of them all, excepting
that of manners and of life; whatever any
one required to be instructed in by him, he
would ever, in the first place, demand an
account of the conditions of his life present

MONTAIGNE 75

and past, which he examined and judged,
esteeming all other learning subordinate and
supernumerary to that: —

"Parum mihi placeant eae literae quae ad
virtutem doctoribus nihil prof uerunt. ' '

Most of the arts have been, in like manner,
decried by the same knowledge; but these
men did not consider that it was from the
purpose to exercise their wits in those very
matters wherein there was no solid ad-
vantage.

As to the rest, some have looked upon
Plato as a dogmatist, others as a doubter;
others, in some things the one, and in other
things the other. Socrates, the conductor of
his dialogisms,is eternally upon questions and
stirring up disputes, never determining, never
satisfying; and professes to have no other
science but that of opposing himself. Homer,
their author, has equally laid the foundations
of all the sects of philosophy, to show how in-
different it was which way we should choose.
'Tis said that ten several sects sprung from
Plato; and, in my opinion, never did any in-
struction halt or waver, if his does not.

76 MONTAIGNE

Socrates said that wise women, in taking
upon them the trade of helping others to
bring forth, left the trade of bringing forth
themselves ; and that he by the title of a sage
man, which the gods had conferred upon him,
was disabled, in his virile and mental love,
of the faculty of bringing forth: contenting
himself to help and assist those who could,
to open their nature, anoint the passes,
facilitate the birth, judge of the infant, bap-
tize it, nourish it, fortify it, swathe it, circum-
cise it: exercising and employing his under-
standing in the perils and fortunes of others.

It is so with the most part of this third sort
of authors, as the ancients have observed in
the writings of Anaxagoras, Democritus,
Parmenides, Xenophanes, and others: they
have a way of writing doubtful in
substance and design, rather inquiring
than teaching, though they mix their
stjle with some dogmatical periods. Is not
the same thing seen in Seneca and Plutarch!
how many contradictions are there to be
found in these, if a man pry narrowly into
them! The reconcilers of the jurisconsults
ought first to reconcile them, each for him-

MONTAIGNE 77

self. Plato seems to have affected this
method of philosophizing in dialogues, to the
end that he might with greater decency from
several mouths deliver the diversity and
variety of his own fancies. To treat vari-
ously of things is to treat of them as well as
conformably, and better, that is to say, more
copiously and with greater profit. Let us
take example from ourselves: judicial judg-
ments are the highest point of dogmatical and
determinative speaking: and yet those which
our parliaments present to the -people, the
most exemplary, and most proper to nourish
in them the reverence due to that dignity,
principally through the sufficiency of the per-
sons exercising it, derive their beauty, not so
much from the conclusion, which with them is
of daily occurrence and common to every
judge, as from the dispute and heat of diverse
and contrary arguments, that questions of
law permit. And the largest field for repre-
hension that some philosophers have against
others is drawn from the diversities and con-
tradictions wherewith every one of them finds
himself perplexed; either on purpose, to show
the vacillation of human wit concerning

78 MONTAIGNE

everything; or ignorantly compelled by the
volubility and incomprehensibility of all mat-
ter; which is the meaning of this phrase: in a
slippery and sliding place let us suspend
our belief: for, as Euripides says: —

*'The works of God in various ways per-
plex us:"

like that which Empedocles, as if shaken by
a divine fury and compelled by truth, often
strewed here and there in his writings. **No,
no; we feel nothing, we see nothing; all things
are concealed from us ; there is not one thing
of which we can positively say it is;" ac-
cording to the divine saying: —

**For the thoughts of mortal men are timid;
and our devices are but uncertain. ' *

It is not to be thought strange if men, despair-
ing to overtake what they hunt after, have
yet not lost the pleasure of the chase, study
being of itself a pleasant employment, and
so pleasant that amongst pleasures the Stoics
forbid that also which proceeds from the ex-
ercise of the intellect, will have it curbed, and

MONTAIGNE 79

find a kind of intemperance in too much
knowledge.

Democritns having eaten figs at his table
that tasted of honey, fell presently to consider
within himself whence they should derive
this unusual sweetness, and to be satisfied in
it, was about to rise from the table to see the
place whence the figs had been gathered;
which his chamber-maid observing, and hav-
ing understood the cause, she smilingly told
him that he need not trouble himself about
that, for she had put them into a vessel in
which there had been honey. He was vexed
that she had thus deprived him of the oc-
casion of this inquisition, and robbed his
curiosity of matter to work upon. "Go thy
way," said he, ''thou hast done me wrong;
but for all that I will seek out the cause, as if
it were natural;" and would willingly have
found out some true reason for a false and
imaginary effect. This story of a famous and
great philosopher very clearly represents to
us the studious passion, that puts us upon the
pursuit of things of the acquisition of which
we despair. Plutarch gives a like example
of one who would not be satisfied in that

80 MONTAIGNE

whereof he was in doubt, that he might not
lose the pleasure of inquiring into it ; like the
other, who would not that his physician
Bhould allay the thirst of his fever that he
might not lose the pleasure of quenching it
by drinking: —

" 'Tis better to learn more than is neces-
sary than nothing at all."

As in all sorts of feeding, there is often only
the mere pleasure of eating, and that what
we take, which is acceptable to the palate,
is not always nourishing or wholesome; so
that which our understandings extract from
learning does not cease to be pleasant, though
there be nothing in it either nutritive or
healthful. Thus say they: the consideration
of nature is a diet proper for our minds; it
raises and elevates us, makes us disdain low
and terrestrial things, by comparing them
with those that are celestial and high: even
the inquisition of great and occult things is
very pleasant, even to those who acquire no
other benefit than the reverence and fear of
judging it. This is what they profess. The
vain image of this sickly curiosity is yet more

MONTAIGNE 81

manifest in this other example that they so
often urge: Eudoxus wished and begged of
the gods that he might once see the sim near
at hand, to comprehend its form, greatness,
and beauty, though on the condition that he
should thereby be immediately burned. He
would, at the price of his life, purchase a
knowledge of which the use and possession
should at the same time be taken from him;
and for this sudden and vanished knowledge,
lose all the other knowledges he had in the
present, or might afterwards acquire.

I do not easily persuade myself that Epi-
curus, Plato, and Pythagoras have given us
their Atoms, Ideas, and Numbers as current
money: they were too wise to establish their
articles of faith upon a thing so uncertain
and so disputable. But, in that obscurity
and ignorance of the world, each of these
great personages endeavored to present some
kind or other of image of light; and worked
their brains for inventions that might, at
all events, have a pleasant and subtle appear-
ance, provided that, false as they were, they
might make good their ground against those
that would oppose them: —

82 MONTAIGNE

"These things every one fancies according
to his wit, and not by any power of knowl-
edge."

One of the ancients, who was reproached
that he professed philosophy, of which he
nevertheless, in his own judgment, made no
great account, answered that this was truly
to philosophize. They would consider all,
balance everything, and found this an em-
ployment well suited to our natural curiosity;
some things they have written for the benefit
of public society, as their religions, and, for
that consideration, it was but reasonable that
they should not examine public opinions too
closely, that they might not disturb the com-
mon obedience to the laws and customs of
their country.

Plato treats of this mystery with a raillery
manifest enough; for where he writes as for
himself, he gives no certain rule: when he
plays the legislator, he borrows a magisterial
and positive style, and boldly there foists in
his most fantastic inventions as fit to per-
suade the vulgar as ridiculous to be believed
by himself; knowing very well how fit we are
to receive all sorts of impressions, especially

MONTAIGNE 83

the most immoderate and violent : and there-
fore in his laws he takes singular care that
nothing be sung in public but poetry, of which
the fabulous relations tend to some useful
end; it being so easy to imprint all sorts of
phantoms in the human mind, that it were
injustice not to feed them rather with profit-
able untruths than with untruths that are un-
profitable or hurtful. He says very plainly in
his Republic, ''that it is very often necessary
for the profit of men to deceive them. " It is
very easy to distinguish that some of the sects
have more followed truth, and others utility,
by which the last have gained their reputa-
tion. 'Tis the misery of our condition, that
often that which presents itself to our imagi-
nation for the most true does not also appear
the most useful to life; the boldest sects, as
the Epicurean, Pyrrhonian, the new
Academic, are yet, after all is said and done,
constrained to submit to the civil law.

Other subjects there are that they have
tumbled and tossed, some to the right and
others to the left, every one endeavoring,
right or wrong, to give them some kind of
color; for having found nothing so abstruse

84 MONTAIGNE

that they would not venture to touch it, they
are often forced to forge weak and ridiculous
conjectures, not that they themselves look
upon them as any foundation, nor as estab-
lishing any certain truth, but merely for
exercise: —

"Not so much that they themselves be-
lieved what they said, as that they seem to
have had a mind to exercise their wits in the
difficulty of the matter."

And if we did not take it thus, how should
we palliate so great inconstancy, variety, and
vanity of opinions as we see have been pro-
duced by those excellent and admirable souls 1
as, for example, what can be more vain than
to imagine to dominate God by our analogies
and conjectures? to regulate Him and the
world by our capacities and our laws? and
to make use, at the expense of the Divinity,
of that small portion of knowledge He has
been pleased to impart to our natural condi-
tion? and, because we cannot extend our
sight to His glorious throne, to have brought
Him down to our corruption and our
miseries ?

MONTAIGNE 85

Of all human and ancient opinions con-
ceming religion, that seems to me the most
likely and most excusable that recognized in
God an incomprehensible power, the original
and preserver of all things, all goodness, all
perfection, receiving and taking in good part
the honor and reverence that man paid unto
Him, under what method, name, or cere-
monies soever: —

"All-powerful Jove, father and mother of
the world, of kings and gods.**

This zeal has universally been looked upon
from heaven with a gracious eye. All govern-
ments have reaped fruit from their devotion:
impious men and actions have everywhere
had suitable result. Pagan histories recog-
nize dignity, order, justice, prodigies, and
oracles, employed for their profit and instruc-
tion in their fabulous religions: God, per-
adventure, through His mercy, vouchsafing
by these temporal benefits to cherish the ten-
der principles of a kind of brutish knowledge
that natural reason gave them of Him amid
the deceiving images of their dreams. Not
only deceiving and false, but impious also,

86 MONTAIGNE

and injurious, are those that man has forged
from his own invention; and of all the re-
ligions that St. Paul found in repute at
Athens, that which they had dedicated to The
Unknown God seemed to him the most to be
excused.

Pythagoras shadowed the truth a little
more closely, judging that the knowledge of
this first Cause and Being of beings ought to
be indefinite, without prescription, without
declaration; that it was nothing else than the
extreme effort of our imagination towards
perfection, every one amplifying the idea ac-
cording to his capacity. But if Numa at-
tempted to conform the devotion of his people
to this project, to attach them to a religion
purely mental, without any prefixed object
and material mixture, he undertook a thing
of no use; the human mind could never sup-
port itself floating in such an infinity of in-
form thoughts; it requires some certain
image thereof to be presented according to
its own model. The Divine Majesty has thus,
in some sort, suffered Himself to be circum-
scribed in corporeal limits for our advantage :
His supernatural and celestial sacraments

MONTAIGNE 87

have signs of our earthly condition: His ador-
ation is by sensible offices and words, for 'tis
man that believes and prays. I omit the
other arguments upon this subject ; but a man
would have much ado to make me believe that
the sight of our crucifixes, that the picture of
our Saviour's piteous passion, that the
ornaments and ceremonious motions of our
churches, that the voices accommodated
to the devotion of our thoughts, and
that emotion of the senses, do not warm the
souls of the people with a religious passion
of very advantageous effect.

Of those, to whom they have given a body,
as necessity required in that universal blind-
ness, I should, I fancy, most incline to those
who adored the sun: —

"The common light that shines indifferently
On all alike, the world's enlightening eyes.
And if the Almighty ruler of the skies
Has eyes, the sunbeams are His radiant eyes.
That life to all impart, maintain, and guard,
And all men's actions upon earth regard.
This great, this beautiful, and glorious sim.
That seasons give by revolution:
That with his influence fills the universe.

88 MONTAIGNE

And with one glance does sullen shades dis-
perse.

Life, soul of the world, that flaming in his
sphere.

Surrounds the heavens in one day's career.

Immensely great, moving, yet firm and
round,

Who the whole world below has fixed his
bound,

At rest without rest, idle without stay.

Nature's firs son, and father of the day:"

forasmuch as besides this grandeur and
beauty of his, 'tis the piece of this machine
that we discover at the remotest distance
from us, and, by that means, so little known
that they were pardonable for entering into
so great admiration and reverence of it.

Thales, who first inquired into this matter,
believed God to be a spirit, that made all
things of water: Anaximander, that the gods
were always dying and re-entering into life at
divers seasons, and that there were an
infinite number of worlds: Anaximenes, that
the air was God, that he was produced and
immense, ever moving. Anaxagoras was the
first who held that the description and sys-

MONTAIGNE 89

tern of all things were conducted by the power
and reason of an infinite spirit. Alcmaeon
gave divinity to the sun, moon, and stars,
and to the soul. Pythagoras made God a
spirit diffused through the nature of all
things, from which our souls are extracted:
Parmenides, a circle surrounding the heaven
and supporting the world by the heat of
light. Empedocles pronounced the four ele-
ments, of which all things are composed, to
be gods: Protagoras had nothing to say,
whether they were or not, or what they were:
Democritus was one while of opinion that the
images of objects and their orbs were gods;
another while, the nature that darts out those
images, and again, our science and intelli-
gence. Plato divides his belief into several
opinions: he says in his Timaeus, that the
father of the world cannot be named;
in his Laws, that men are not to in-
quire into his being; and elsewhere,
in the same books, he makes the world,
the heavens, the stars, the earth, and
our souls, gods; admitting, moreover, those
which have been received by ancient institu-
tion in every republic. Xenophon reports a

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like perplexity in Socrates' doctrine; one
while, tliat men are not to inquire into the
form of God, and presently makes him main-
tain that the smi is God, and the soul, God;
first, that there is but one God, and after-
wards that there are many. Speusippus, the
nephew of Plato, makes God a certain power
governing all things, and that it is animal.
Aristotle, one while says it is the mind, and
another while the world; now he gives this
world another master, and again makes God
the heat of heaven. Xenocrates makes eight;
five named amongst the planets, the sixth
composed of all the fixed stars, as of so many
members ; the seventh and the eighth, the sun
and the moon. Heraclides Ponticus does
nothing but float in his opinions, and finally
deprives God of sense and making him shiift
from one form to another: and at last says,
that 'tis heaven and earth. Theophrastus
wanders in the same irresolution amongst his
various fancies, attributing the superintend-
ence of the world one while to the under-
standing, another while to heaven, and then
to the stars: Strato says 'tis nature having
the power of generation, augmentation and

MONTAIGNE 91

diminution, without form and sentiment:
Zeno says 'tis the law of nature commanding
good and prohibiting evil, which law is ani-
mal; and abolishes the accustomed gods,
Jupiter, Juno, and Vesta : Diogenes ApoUoni-
ates says 'tis air. Xenophanes makes God
round, seeing and hearing, not breathing, and
having nothing in common with human
nature. Aristo thinks the form of God to be
incomprehensible, deprives Him of sense, and
knows not whether He be animal or some-
thing else : Cleanthes one while supposes Him
to be reason, another while the world, then
the soul of nature, and then the supreme heat
surrounding and enveloping all things.
Perseus, Zeno's disciple, was of opinion
that men have given the title of gods to such
as have added any notable advantage to
human life, and even to profitable things
themselves. Chrysippus made a confused
heap of all the preceding lucubrations, and
reckons, amongst a thousand forms of gods
that he makes, the men also that have been
deified. Diagoras and Theodorus flatly de-
nied that there were any gods at all. Epi-
curus makes the gods shining, transparent,

92 MONTAIGNE ;

and perflable, lodged, as betwixt two forts,
betwixt two worlds, secure from blows;
clothed in a human figure and with such mem-
bers as we have, which members are to them
of no use: —

*'I have ever thought, and still think, there
are gods above, but I do not conceive that
they care what men do."

Trust to your philosophy, my masters, and
brag that you have found the bean in the
cake, with all this rattle from so many philo-
sophical heads! The perplexity of so many
worldly forms has gained this for me, that
manners and opinions contrary to mine do not
so much displease as instruct me ; nor so much
make me proud, as they humble me in com-
paring them; and all other choice than what
comes from the express and immediate hand
of God, seems to me a choice of very little
prerogative. The polities of the world are no
less opposed upon this subject than the
schools: by which we may understand that
fortune itself is not more variable and
diverse, nor more blind and inconsiderate,
than our reason. The things that are most

MONTAIGNE 93

unknown are the most proper to be deified;
wherefore, to make gods of ourselves, as the
ancients did, exceeds the extremest weakness
of understanding. I should much rather have
gone along with those who adored the ser-
pent, the dog, or the ox; forasmuch as their
nature and their being are less known to us,
and that we are more at liberty to imagine
what we please of those beasts, and to at-
tribute to them extraordinary faculties; but
to have made gods of our own condition, of
which we should know the imperfection, and
to have attributed to them desire, anger, re-
venge, marriages, generation, alliances, love
and jealousy, our members and bones, our
fevers and pleasures, our death and obsequies,
this must needs proceed from a marvellous
intoxication of human understanding: —

''Which things are so remote from the
divine nature, that they are unworthy to be
ranked among the gods."

** Their forms, ages, clothes, ornaments are
known: their descents, marriages, kindred,
and all appropriated to the similitude of
human weakness ; for they are represented to

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us with anxious minds, and we read of the
lusts, sickness, and anger of the gods;**

as having attributed divinity not only to
faith, virtue, honor, concord, liberty, victory,
piety, but also to voluptuousness, fraud,
death, envy, old age, misery ; to fear, fever, ill
fortune, and other injuries of our frail and
transitory life:

"Into our temples to what end introduce
our own corrupt manners? 0 souls, bending
to the earth, devoid of all heavenly senti-
ments!'*

The Egyptians with a bold foresight inter-
dicted, upon pain of hanging, that any one
should say that their gods Serapis and Isis
had formerly been men, and yet no one was
ignorant that they had been such; and their
eJ05gies, represented with the finger upon the
mouth, signified, says Varro, this mysterious
decree to their priests, to conceal their mortal
original, as it must, by necessary consequence,
annul all the veneration paid to them. See-
ing that man so much desired to equal him-
self to God, he had done better, says Cicero,

MONTAIGNE 95

to have attracted the divine conditions to
himself, and have drawn them down hither
below, than to send his corruption and misery
up on high: but, in truth, he has in several
ways done both the one and the other, with
like vanity of opinion.

When the philosophers search narrowly
into the hierarchy of their gods, and make a
great bustle about distinguishing their alli-
ances, offices, and power, I cannot believe they
speak with any seriousness. When Plato de-
scribes Pluto's verge to us, and the bodily
pleasures or pains that await us after the ruin
and annihiliation of our bodies, and accom-
modates them to the notions we have of them
in this life: —

** Secret paths hide them, and myrtle groves
environ them; their cares do not leave them
when they die

j>

when Mohammed promises his followers a
paradise hung with tapestry, adorned with
gold and precious stones, furnished with
wenches of excelling beauty, rare wines and
delicate dishes, I easily discern that these
are mockers who accommodate their promises

96 MONTAIGNE

to our stupidity, to attract and allure us by
hopes and opinions suitable to our mortal ap-
petite. And yet some amongst us are fallen
into the like error, promising to thelnselves,
after the resurrection, a terrestrial and tem«
poral life, accompanied with all sorts of
worldly conveniences and pleasures. Can we
believe that Plato, he who had such heavenly
conceptions, and was so conversant with
Divinity as thence to derive the name of the
Divine Plato, ever thought that the poor
creature, man, had anything in him applica-
ble to that incomprehensible power? and that
he believed that the weak holds we are able
to take were capable, or the force of our un-
derstanding robust enough to participate of
eternal beatitude or pain? We should then
tell him, on behalf of human reason: if the
pleasures thou dost promise us in the other
life are of the same kind that I have enjoyed
here below, that has nothing in common with
infinity: though all my five natural senses
should be loaded with pleasure and my soul
full of all the contentment it could hope or
desire, we know what all this amounts to ; all
this would be nothing: if there be anything of

MONTAIGNE 97.

mine there, there is nothing divine ; if it be no
more than what may belong to our present
condition, it cannot be reckoned; all content-
ment of mortals is mortal^ the recognition of
our parents, children, and friends, if that can
touch and delight us in the other world, if
there it still continue a satisfaction to us, we
still remain in earthly and finite con-
veniences: we cannot, as we ought, conceive
the grandeur of those high and divine
promises, if we can in any sort conceive them;
to have a worthy imagination of them we
must imagine them unimaginable, inexplica-
ble, and incomprehensible, and absolutely
another thing than any in our miserable ex-
perience. ''Eye hath not seen," says St.
Paul, ''nor ear heard, neither have entered
into the heart of man, the things which God
hath prepared for them that love Him. ' ' And
if to render us capable of them, our being be
reformed and changed (as thou, Plato, sayest
by thy purifications), it must be so extreme
and total a change that, by physical doctrine,
it will be no more us: —

"He was Hector whilst he was fighting; but

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when dragged by Achilles' steeds, he was no
longer Hector:"

it must be something else that must receive
these recompenses: —

**What is changed is dissolved, and there-
fore perishes; for the parts are separated, and
depart from their order."

For, in Pythagoras ' metempsychosis, and the
change of habitation that he imagined in
souls, can we believe that the lion in whom
the soul of Caesar is enclosed espouses
Caesar's passions, or that the lion is he? If
it were still Caesar, they would be in the right
who, controverting this opinion with Plato,
reproach him that the son might be seen to
ride his mother transformed into a mule, and
the like absurdities. And can we believe that
in the mutations that are made of the bodies
of animals into others of the same kind, the
newcomers are not other than their predeces-
sors? From the ashes of a phoenix a work,
they say, is engendered, and from that
another phoenix; who can imagine that
this second phoenix is not other than

MONTAIGNE 99

the first! We see our silkworms as it
were die and wither; and from this withered
body a butterfly is produced, and from that
another worm; how ridiculous would it be to
imagine that this were still the first? that
which has once ceased to be is no more : —

*'Nor, though time should collect after
death our material atoms, and restore them
to the form they had before, and give us again
new light of life, would that new figure con-
cern us at all; the sense of our being, once
interrupted, is gone."

And, Plato, when thou sayest, in another
place, that it shall be the spiritual part of
man that will be concerned in the fruition of
the recompenses of another life, thou tellest
us a thing wherein there is as little appear-
ance of truth: —

"No more than eyes once torn from their
sockets can ever after see anything;'*

for, by this account, it would no more be
man, nor consequently us, who should be con-
cerned in this enjoyment: for we are com-
posed of two principally essential parts, the

100 MONTAIGNE

separation of which is the death and ruin of
our being: —

"For, when life is extinct, all motions of
sense are dispersed and banished;"

we cannot say that the man suffers when the
worms feed upon his members and that the
earth consumes them:

**That is nothing to us whose being solely
consists in the strict xmion of body and soul.'*

Moreover, upon what foundation of their
justice can the gods take notice of or re-
ward man after his death, for his good and
virtuous actions, since it was they themselves
who put them in the way and mind to do
them? And why should they be offended at
and punish him for evil actions, since they
themselves have created him in so frail a con-
dition, and that, with one glance of their will,
they might prevent him from evil doing!
Might not Epicurus, with great color of
human reason, object this to Plato, did he
not often save himself with this sentence:
''That it is impossible to establish anything
certain of the immortal nature by the

MONTAIGNE 101

mortal?" She does nothing but err through-
out, but especially when she meddles with
divine things. Who more evidently perceives
this than we? For although we have given
her certain and infallible principles, and
though we have enlightened her steps, with
the sacred lamp of the truth that it has
pleased God to communicate to us, we daily
see, nevertheless, that if she swerve never so
little from the ordinary path, and that she
stray from or wander out of the way set out
and beaten by the Church, how immediately
she loses, confounds, and fetters herself,
tumbling and floating in this vast, turbulent,
and waving sea of human opinions, without
restraint and without any determinate end:
so soon as she loses that great and common
road she enters into a labyrinth of a thousand
several paths.

Man cannot be anything but what he is,
nor imagine beyond the reach of his capacity.
" 'Tis a greater presumption," says Plut-
arch, ' '■ in them who are but men to attempt to
speak and discourse of the gods and demi-
gods, than it is in a man, utterly ignorant
of music, to judge of singing; or in a man

102 MONTAIGNE

who never saw a camp to dispute about arms
and martial affairs, presuming, by some light
conjecture, to understand the effect of an art
to which he is totally a stranger. ' ' Antiquity,
I fancy, thought to put a compliment upon
and to add something to the divine grandeur
in assimilating it to man, investing it with
his faculties and adorning it with his fine
humors and most shameful necessities: offer-
ing to it our aliments to eat, our dances,
mummeries, and farces to divert it, our vest-
ments to cover it, and our houses to inhabit;
caressing it with the odors of incense and the
sounds of music, with festoons and nosegays;
and, to accommodate it to our vicious pas-
sions, flattering its justice with inhuman
vengeance, delighting it with the ruin and
dissipating of things by it created and pre-
served: as Tiberius Sempronius, who burned
the rich spoils and arms he had gained from
the enemy in Sardinia as a sacrifice to Vul-
can, and Paulus Aemilius those of Macedonia
to Mars and Minerva. And Alexander, arriv-
ing at the Indian Ocean, threw several great
vessels of gold into the sea in favor of Thetis,
and, moreover, loaded her altars with a

MONTAIGNE 103

slaughter, not of innocent beasts only, but of
men also; as several nations, and ours
amongst the rest, ordinarily used to do; and
I believe there is no nation that has not done
the same: —

*'Four sons of Sulmo, and as many more
whom Ufens bred, he seized alive, to offer
them a sacrifice to the infernal gods."

The Getae hold themselves to be immortal,
and that death is nothing but a journey to
Zamolxis their god. Once in every five years
they despatch some one amongst them to
him, to entreat of him such necessaries as
they require. This envoy is chosen by lot,
and the form of his despatch, after having
been instructed by word of mouth what he is
to say, is, that of those present three hold out
so many javelins, against which the rest
throw his body with all their force. If he
happen to be wounded in a mortal part and
that he immediately die, 'tis reputed a certain
sign of divine favor; if he escape, he is looked
upon as a wicked and execrable wretch, and
another is deputed after the same manner in
his stead. Amestris, the wife of Xerxes, hav-

104 MONTAIGNE

ing grown old, caused at once fourteen young
men of the best families of Persia to be buried
alive, according to the religion of the country,
to gratify some infernal deity. And to this
day the idols of Themixtitan are cemented
with the blood of little children, and they de-
light in no sacrifice but of these pure and in-
fantine souls: a justice thirsty of innocent
blood!—

''Religion could persuade men to so many
mischiefs."

The Carthaginians inmiolated their own chil-
dren to Saturn; and such as had none of their
own bought of others, the father and mother
being further obliged to attend the ceremony
with a gay and contented countenance.

It was a strange fancy to seek to gratify
the divine goodness with our affliction. Like
the Lacedaemonians, who courted their Diana
with the tormenting of young boys, whom
they caused to be whipped for her sake, very
often to death: it was a savage humor to
think to gratify the Architect by the subver-
sion of His building, and to think to take
away the punishment due to the guilty by

MONTAIGNE 105

punishing the innocent; and that poor
Iphigenia, at the port of Anlis, should by her
death and sacrifice acquit towards God the
whole army of the Greeks from all the crimes
they had committed: —

*'But that the chaste girl, on the very eve
of her nuptials, should die, a sad victim, im-
molated by her father;"

and that those two noble and generous souls
of the two Decii, father and son, to incline
the favor of the gods to be propitious to the
affairs of Rome, should throw themselves
headlong into the thickest of the enemy: —

**How great an injustice in the gods was it
that they could not be reconciled to the people
of Rome unless such men perished!"

To which may be added, that it is not for
the criminal to cause himself to be scourged
according to his own measure nor at his own
time; but that it wholly belongs to the judge,
who considers nothing as chastisement but
the pain he appoints, and cannot deem that
punishment which proceeds from the consent
of him who suffers: the divine vengeance

106 MONTAIGNE

presupposes an absolute dissent in us, both
for its justice and our own penalty. And
therefore it was a ridiculous humor of Poly-
crates the tyrant of Samos, who, to interrupt
the continued course of his good fortune and
to balance it, went and threw the dearest and
most precious jewel he had into the sea,
fancying that by this voluntary mishap he
bribed and satisfied the revolution and vicis-
situde of fortune; and she, to mock his folly,
ordered it so that the same jewel came again
into his hands, found in the belly of a fish.
And then to what end are those tearings and
mutilations of the Corybantes, the Menades,
and in our times of the Mohammedans, who
slash their faces, bosoms, and members to
gratify their prophet: seeing that the offence
lies in the will, not in the breasts, eyes, geni-
tories, in plumpness, in the shoulders, or the
throat? —

**So great is the fury of the mind per-
turbed, and dislodged from its seat, that the
gods may be appeased, whereas even men do
not show anger."

The use of this natural contexture has not

MONTAIGNE 107

only respect to us, but also the service of God
and of other men ; and 'tis as unjust wilfully
to wound or hurt it, as to kill ourselves upon
any pretence whatever; it seems to be great
cowardice and treason to exercise cruelty
upon and to destroy the functions of the body,
stupid and servile, in order to spare the soul
the trouble of governing them according to
reason: —

** Where they fear the angry gods, who are
thus propitiated? Some, indeed, have been
made eunuchs for the lust of princes : but no
man at his master's command has put his own
hand to unman himself."

So did they fill their religion with many ill
effects: —

** Formerly religion often inspired wicked
and impious deeds."

Now nothing about us can, in any sort, be
compared or likened unto the divine nature
that will not blemish and tarnish it with so
much imperfection. How can that infinite
beauty, power, and goodness admit of any
correspondence or similitude to so abject a

108 MONTAIGNE

thing as we are, without extreme wrong and
dishonor to His divine greatness ?-

"For the foolishness of God is wiser than
men, and the weakness of God is stronger
than men/*

Stilpo the philosopher being asked whether
the gods were delighted with our adorations
and sacrifices: **You are indiscreet,'*
answered he; *4et us withdraw apart if you
talk of such things." Nevertheless, we pre-
scribe Him bounds, we keep His power be-
sieged by our reasons (I call reason our
reveries and dreams with the dispensation of
philosophy, which says, that the wicked man,
and even the fool, go mad by reason, but 'tis
by a particular form of reason) ; we will sub-
ject Him to the vain and feeble appearances
of our understanding; Him who has made
both us and our understanding. Because
nothing is made of nothing, God, therefore,
could not have made the world without mat-
ter. What! has God put into our hands the
keys and most secret springs of His power;
is He obliged not to exceed the limits of our
knowledge? Put the case, 0 man, that thou

MONTAIGNE 109

hast been able here to mark some footsteps of
His effects: dost thou, therefore, think that
He has therein employed all He can, and has
crowded all His forms and all His ideas in
this work? Thou seest nothing but the order
and regulation of this little vault wherein
thou art lodged — if thou dost see so much —
whereas His divinity has an infinite jurisdic-
tion beyond; this part is nothing in compari-
son of the whole: —

** Since all things in heaven, earth, and
sea are as nothing to the totality of the great
All:"

'tis a municipal law that thou allegest; thou
knowest not what is the universal. Tie thy-
self to that to which thou art subject, but not
Him; He is not of thy brotherhood, thy fel-
low-citizen, or companion. If He has in some
sort communicated Himself unto thee, 'tis
not to debase Himself to thy littleness, nor
to make thee controller of His power; the
human body cannot fly to the clouds. 'Tis for
thee the sun runs without resting every day
his ordinary course: the bounds of the seas
and the earth cannot be confounded; the

no MONTAIGNE

water is unstable and without firmness; a
wall, unless it be broken, is impenetrable to
a solid body; a man cannot preserve his life
in the flames; he cannot be both in heaven
and upon earth, and corporally in a thousand
places at once . 'Tis for thee that He has made
these rules; *tis thee that they concern; He
manifested to the Christians that He en-
franchised them all, when it pleased Him.
And, in truth, why, almighty as He is, should
He have limited His power within any certain
bounds? In favor of whom should He have
renounced His privilege? Thy reason has in
no other thing more of likelihood and founda-
tion, than in that wherein it persuades thee
that there is a plurality of worlds: —

"And the earth, and sun, moon, sea, and
the rest that are, are not single, but rather
innumerable;'*

the most eminent minds of elder times be-
lieved it, and some of this age of ours, com-
pelled by the appearances of human reason,
do the same! forasmuch as in this fabric that
we behold there is nothing single and one: —

MONTAIGNE 111

"Since there is nothing single in this
mighty mass, that can alone beget, or alone
increase;"

and that all the kinds are multiplied in some
number or other; by which it seems not to be
likely that God should h^ve made this work
only without a companion, and that the mat-
ter of this form should have been totally ex-
hausted in this sole individual : —

''Wherefore it is again and again neces-
sary to confers that there must elsewhere be
other aggregations of matter, just as that
which the air holds in strict grasp,"

especially if it be a living creature, which its
motions render so credible that Plato affirms
it, and that many of our people either con-
firm it or do not venture to deny it : no more
than that ancient opinion, that the heaven,
the stars, and other members of the world,
are creatures composed of body and soul,
mortal in respect of their composition, but
immortal by the determination of the Creator.
Now, if there be many worlds, as Demo-
critus, Epicurus, and almost all philosorphy

112 MONTAIGNE

has believed, how do we know that the prin-
ciples and rules of this of onrs in like manner
concern the rest? They may, peradventnre,
have another form and another polity. Epi-
curus supposes them either like or unlike.
We see in this world an infinite difference
and variety, merely by distance of places;
neither com nor wine, nor any of our ani-
mals, are to be seen in that new comer of the
world discovered by our fathers; 'tis all there
another thing; and, in times past, do but con-
sider in how many parts of the world they
had no knowledge either of Bacchus or Ceres.
If Pliny and Herodotus are to be believed,
there are, in certain places, kinds of men very
little resembling us; and there are mongrel
and ambiguous forms betwixt the human and
brutal natures: there are countries where
men are bom without heads, having their
mouth and eyes in their breast; where they
are all hermaphrodites; where they go on all
fours; where they have but one eye in the
forehead, and a head more like that of a dog
than like one of ours. Where they are half
fish the lower part, and live in the water;
where the women bear at five years old, and

MONTAIGNE 113

live but eight; where the head and skin of the
forehead are so hard, that a sword will not
enter it, bnt rebounds; where men have no
beards; nations that know not the use of fire;
and others that eject their seed of a black
color. What shall we say of those that natur-
ally change themselves into wolves, colts,
and then into men again? And if it be true,
as Plutarch says, that in some place of the
Indies, there are men without mouths, who
nourish themselves with the smell of certain
odors, how many of our descriptions are
false? Man, at this rate, becomes more than
ludicrous, and, peradventure, quite incapable
of reason and society; the disposition and
cause of our internal structure would, for
the most part, be to no purpose.

Moreover, how many things are there in
our own knowledge that oppose those fine
rules we have cut out for and prescribed to
Nature? And yet we must undertake to cir-
cumscribe God Himself! How many things
do we call miraculous and contrary to
Nature! this is done by every nation and by
every man, according to the measure of their
ignorance: how many occult properties and

114 MONTAIGNE

quintessences do we discover? For, with usj
to go * ' according to Nature, " is no more but
to go ** according to our intelligence,'^ as far
as that is able to follow, and as far as we are
able to see into it: all beyond that must be
monstrous and irregular. Now, by this ac-
count, all things shall be monstrous to the
wisest and most understanding men; for
human reason has persuaded them that it has
no manner of ground or foundation, not so
much as to be assured that snow is white;
and Anaxagoras affirmed it to be black; if
there be anything, or if there be nothing; if
there be knowledge or ignorance, which
Metrodorus of Chios denied that man was
able to determine; or whether we live, as
Euripides doubts, ''whether the life we live
is life, or whether that we call death be not
life:"—

"Who knows if living, which is called
dying because living is dying,"

and not without some appearance: for why
do we, from this instant which is but a flash
in the infinite course of an eternal night, and
so short an interruption of our perpetual and
natural condition, death possessing all that

MONTAIGNE 115

passed before and all the future of this
moment, and also a good part of the moment
itself, derive the title of Being! Others swear
there is no motion at all, as the followers of
Melissus, and that nothing stirs; for if there
be nothing but One, neither can that spheri-
cal motion be of any use to him, nor the
motion from one place to another, as Plato
proves; others say there's neither generation
nor corruption in Nature. Protagoras says
that there is nothing in Nature but doubt,
that a man may equally dispute of all things.
Nausiphanes, that of things which seem to be,
nothing is more than it is not: that there is
nothing certain but uncertainty: Parmenides,
that of that which it seems there is no one
thing in general ; that there is but One ; Zeno,
that there's no One, and that there is noth-
ing: if there were One, it would either be in
another or in itself; if it be in another, they
are two; if it be in itself, they are yet two;
the comprehending and the comprehended.
According to these doctrines, the nature of
things is no other than a shadow, either vain
or absolutely false.

This way of speaking in a Christian man
has ever seemed to me very indiscreet and

116 MONTAIGNE

irreverent: "God cannot die; God cannot con-
tradict himself; God cannot do this, or that."
I do not like to have the divine power so
limited by the laws of men 's mouths ; and the
idea which presents itself to us in those
propositions, ought to be more religiously
and reverently expressed.

Our speaking has its failings and defects,
as well as all the rest : grammar is that which
creates most disturbances in the world: our
suits only spring from disputation as to the
interpretation of laws: and most wars pro-
ceed from the inability of ministers clearly
to express the conventions and treaties of
amity among princes. How many quarrels,
and those of how great importance, has the
doubt of the meaning of this syllable Hoc
created in the world? Let us take the con-
clusion that logic itself presents us as mani-
festly clear: if you say it is fine weather, and
that you say true, it is, then, fine weather.
Is not this a very certain form of speaking?
and yet it will deceive us; that it will do so,
let us follow thie example: if you say, I lie,
and that you say true, then you do lie. The
art, reason, and force of the conclusion of

MONTAIGNE 117

this are the same with the other; and yet we
are gravelled. The Pyrrhonian philosophers,
I see, cannot express their general concep
tion in any kind of speaking; for they would
require a new language on purpose; ours is all
formed of afl&rmative propositions, which are
totally hostile to them; insomuch that when
they say, *'I doubt," they are presently taken
by the throat, to make them confess that at
least they know and are assured of this, that
they do doubt. And so they have been com-
pelled to shelter themselves under this medi-
cinal comparison, without which their humor
would be inexplicable: when they pronounce,
"I know not:" or, '*! doubt;" they say that
this proposition carries off itself with the
rest, no more nor less than rhubarb that
drives out the ill humors and carries itself off
with them. This fancy is more certainly im-
derstood by interrogation: What do I know?
as I bear it in the emblem of a balance.

See what use we make of this irreverent
way of speaking: in the present disputes
about our religion, if you press the adver-
saries too hard, they will roundly tell you,
' ' that it is not in the power of God to make it

118 MONTAIGNE

so that His body should be in paradise and
upon earth, and in several places at once.**
And see what advantage the old scoffer makes
of this! *'At least,'* says he, "it is no little
consolation to man to see that God cannot do
all things; for he cannot kill himself though
he would, which is the greatest privilege we
have in our condition: he cannot make
mortals immortal, nor revive the dead, nor
make it so that he who has lived has not, nor
that he who has had honors, has not had
them, having no other power over the past
than that of oblivion. And that the compari-
son of a man to God may yet be made out by
pleasant examples, he cannot order it so that
twice ten shall not be twenty.** This is what
he says, and what a Christian ought to take
heed shall not escape his lips; whereas, on
the contrary, it seems as if all men studied
this impudent kind of blasphemous language,
to reduce God to their own measure: —

**Let it shine or rain to-morrow, this can-
not alter the past, nor tmcreate and render
void that which the fleeting hour has once
brought."

MONTAIGNE 119

When we say, that the infinity of ages, as
well past as to come, are but one instant with
God; that His goodness, wisdom, and power
are the same with His essence, our mouths
speak it, but our understandings apprehend
it not. And yet such is our outrageous
opinion of ourselves, that we must make the
divinity pass through our sieve; and from
this proceed all the dreams and errors with
which the world aboimds, when we reduce
and weigh in our balance a thing so far above
our poise: —

" 'Tis wonderful to what the wickedness of
man's heart will proceed, invited by some
success.'*

How magisterially and insolently do the
Stoics reprove Epicurus for maintaining that
the truly good and happy Being appertained
only to God, and that the Sage had nothing
but a shadow and resemblance of it? How
daringly have they bound God to destiny
(a thing that, by my consent, none that bears
the name of a Christian shall ever do again) ;
while Thales, Plato, and Pythagoras have en-

120 MONTAIGNE

slaved him to necessity. This arrogance of
attempting to discover God with our weak
eyes, has been the cause that an eminent per-
son of our nation has attributed to the
divinity a corporal form; and is the reason of
what happens amongst us every day of at-
tributing to God important events, by a
special appointment : because they sway with
us, they conclude that they also sway with
Him, and that He has a more intent and
vigilant regard to them than to others of less
moment, or of ordinary course : —

''The gods concern themselves with great
matters, disregard the small:**

observe His example; He will clear this to
you by His reason: —

"Neither do kings in their dominions take
notice of all minor matters;"

as if to that King of kings it were more and
less to subvert a kingdom or to move the leaf
of a tree: or as if His providence acted after
another manner in inclining the event of a
battle than in the leap of a flea. The hand of

MONTAIGNE 121

His government is laid upon everything after
the same manner, with the same power and
order: our interest does nothing towards it;
our inclinations and measures sway nothing
with Him: —

''God is thus a great artificer in great
things, that He may not be less so in small
ones."

Our arrogance sets this blasphemous com-
parison ever before us. Because our employ-
ments are a burden to us, Strato has courte-
ously been pleased to exempt the gods from
all offices, as their priests are; he makes
nature produce and support all things; and
with her weights and motions make up the
several parts of the world, discharging
human nature from the awe of divine judg-
ments : —

"What is blessed and eternal, has neither
any business itself nor gives any to another. ' '

Nature wills that in like things there should
be a like relation: the infinite number of
mortals, therefore, concludes a like number
of immortals ; the infinite things that kill and

122 MONTAIGNE

destroy presuppose as many that preserve
and profit. As the souls of the gods without
tongue, eyes, or ear, each of them feels
amongst themselves what the others feel,
and judge our thoughts; so the souls of men,
when at liberty and loosed from the body,
either by sleep, or some ecstasy, divine, fore-
tell, and see things, which, whilst joined to
the body, they could not see. "Men,'* says
St. Paul, "professing themselves to be wise,
they became fools, and changed the glory of
the uncorruptible God into an image made
like to corruptible man. ' ' Do but take notice
of the jugglery in the ancient deification:
after the grand and stately pomp of the
funeral, so soon as the fire began to mount to
the top of the pyramid and to catch hold of
the hearse where the body lay, they, at the
same time, turned out an eagle, which, flying
upward, signified that the soul went into
Paradise; we have still a thousand medals,
and particularly of that honest woman Faus-
tina, where this eagle is represented carrying
these deified souls with their heels upwards,
towards heaven. 'Tis a pity that we should
fool ourselves with our own fopperies and in-
ventions : —

MONTAIGNE 123

"They fear what they themselves have in-
vented:"

like children who are frightened with the face
of their companion that they themselves have
smutted: —

**As if anything conld be more unhappy
than man, who is domineered over by his own
fancies.'*

'Tis far from honoring Him who made ns, to
honor him whom we have made. Augustus
had more temples than Jupiter, served with
as much religion and belief of miracles. The
Thasians, in return for the benefits they had
received from Agesilaus, coming to bring him
word that they had canonized him: "Has your
nation," said he to them, "the power to make
gods of whom they please? Pray first deify
some one amongst yourselves, and when I see
what advantage he has by it, I will thank you
for your offer." Man is certainly stark mad;
he cannot make a flea, and yet he will be
making gods by dozens. Hear what Tris-
megestus says in praise of our sufficiency:
"Of all the wonderful things, it surmounts
all wonder that man could find out the divine

124 MONTAIGNE

nature and make it." And take here the
arguments of the school of philosophy
itself: —

**To whom alone it is given to know the
gods and deities of heaven, or know that we
can know them not."

"If there be a God, He is a corporeal
creature; if He be a corporeal creature, He
has sense; and if He has sense, He is subject
to corruption. K He be without a body. He
is without a soul, and consequently without
action: and if He have a body it is perish-
able." Is not here a triumph! We are in-
capable of having made the world; there
must, then, be some more excellent nature
that has put a hand to the work. It were a
foolish and ridiculous arrogance to esteem
ourselves the most perfect thing of this uni-
verse: there must, then, be something that is
better and more perfect, and that is God.
When you see a stately and stupendous
edifice, though you do not know who is the
owner of it, you would yet conclude it was
not built for rats: and this divine structure
that we behold of the celestial palace, have

MONTAIGNE 125

we not reason to believe that it is the resi-
dence of some possessor, who is much greater
than we ! Is not the highest always the most
worthy; and we are placed lowest to Him.
Nothing without a soul and without reason
can produce a living creature capable of
reason; the world produces us; the world,
then, has soul and reason. Every part of us
is less than we: we are part of the world; the
world, therefore, is endued with wisdom and
reason, and that more abundantly than we.
'Tis a fine thing to have a great government:
the government of the world, then, appertains
to some happy nature. The stars do us no
harm: they are, then, full of goodness. "We
have need of nourishment; then so have the
gods also; and they feed upon the vapors of
the earth. "Worldly goods are not goods to
God; therefore they are not goods to us. Of-
fending, and being offended, are equally
testimonies of imbecility: 'tis, therefore, folly
to fear God. God is good by His nature; man
by his industry, which is more. The divine
and human wisdom have no other distinction,
but that the first is eternal : but duration is no
accession to wisdom; therefore, we are com-

126 MONTAIGNE

panions. We have life, reason, and liberty;
we esteem goodness, charity, and justice:
these qualities, then, are in Him." In fine,
the building and destroying the conditions
of the divinity are forged by man, according
as they bear relation to himself. What a pat-
tern! what a model! Let us stretch, let us
raise and swell human qualities as much as
we please: puff up thyself, poor creature, yet
more and more, and more: —

**Not if thou burst, said he."

"Certainly they do not imagine God, whom
they cannot imagine; but they imagine them-
selves in His stead: they do not compare
Him, but themselves, not to Him, but to
themselves."

In natural things the effects but half relate
to their causes: what about this? it is above
the order of nature; its condition is too
elevated, too remote, and too mighty to per-
mit itself to be bound and fettered by our con-
clusions. *Tis not through ourselves that we
arrive at that place: our ways lie too low: we
are no nearer heaven on the top of Mount
Cenis than at the bottom of the sea : take the

MONTAIGNE 127

distance with your astrolabe. They debase
God even to the carnal knowledge of women,
to so many times, to so many propagations:
Panlina the wife of Satnminus, a matron of
great reputation at Eome, thinking she lay
with the god Serapis, found herself in the
arms of a lover of hers, through the pan-
darism of the priests of the temple. Varro,
the most subtle and most learned of all the
Latin authors, in his book of theology, writes
that the sacristan of Hercules* temple, throw-
ing dice with one hand for himself and with
the other for Hercules, played after that man-
ner with him for a supper and a wench: if he
won, at the expense of the offerings: if he
lost, at his own. He lost, and paid the supper
and the wench. Her name was Laurentina:
she saw by night this god in her arms, who,
moreover, told her that the first she met the
next day, should give her a heavenly reward;
which proved to be Taruncius, a rich young
man, who took her home to his house, and in
time left her his heiress. She, in her turn,
thinking to do a thing that would be pleasing
to his god, left the people of Eome her heirs,
and therefore had divine honors voted to her.

128 MONTAIGNE

As if it were not sufficient that Plato was
originally descended from the gods by a
double line, and that he had Neptune for the
common father of his race, it was certainly
believed at Athens that Aristo, having a mind
to enjoy the fair Perictione, could not, and
was warned by the god Apollo in a dream to
leave her xmpolluted and untouched till she
should first be brought to bed. These were
the father and mother of Plato. How many
ridiculous stones are there of like cuckold-
ings conmaitted by the gods against poor
mortals ? and how many husbands injuriously
disgraced in favor of their children? In the
Mohammedan religion, there are plenty of
Merlins, found by the belief of the people,
that is to say, children without fathers,
spiritual, divinely conceived in the wombs
of virgins, and who bear a name that signifies
as much in their language.

We are to observe that to every creature
nothing is more dear and estimable than its
own being; the lion, the eagle, dolphin priz-
ing nothing beyond their own kind, and that
everything refers the qualities of all other
things to its own proper qualities, which we

MONTAIGNE 129

may indeed extend or contract, but that^s
all; for beyond that relation and principle,
our imagination cannot go, can guess at noth-
ing else, nor possibly go out thence or stretch
beyond it. From which spring these ancient
conclusions: *'0f all forms, the most beauti-
ful is that of man; therefore God must be of
that form. No one can be happy without
virtue, nor virtue be without reason, and
reason cannot inhabit anywhere but in a
human shape: God is therefore clothed in a
human shape:" —

**It is so imprinted in our minds, and the
fancy is so prepossessed with it, that when
a man thinks of God, a human figure ever
presents itself to the imagination."

Therefore it was that Xenophanes pleasantly
said, that if beasts frame any gods to them-
selves, as 'tis likely they do, they make them
certainly such as themselves are, and glorify
themselves therein as we do. For why may
not a goose say thus: "All parts of the uni-
verse have I an interest in; the earth serves
me to walk upon, the sun to light me, the
stars to spread their influence upon me; I

130 MONTAIGNE

have such an advantage by the winds, such
conveniences by the waters: there is nothing
that yon heavenly roof looks upon so favor-
ably as me; I am the darling of nature. Is it
not man that feeds, lodges, and serves met
'Tis for me that he sows and grinds; if he
eats me, he does the same by his fellow-man,
and so do I the worms that kill and devour
him.'* As much might be said by a crane,
and more magnificently, upon the account of
the liberty of his flight, and the possession
of that high and beautiful region: —

**So flattering and wheedling is nature to
herself."

By the same consequence, the destinies are,
then, for us, for us the world; it shines, it
thunders for us; creator and creatures all are
for us: 'tis the mark and point to which the
universality of things is directed. Look into
the records that philosophy has kept, for two
thousand years and more, of the affairs of
heaven; the gods all that while have neither
acted nor spoken but for man: she does not
allow them any other consultation or voca-
tion. See them, here, against us in war: —

MONTAIGNE 131

' ' The sons of earth, subdued by the hand of
Hercules, in the rude shock made old
Saturn's refulgent palace shake."

And here see them participate of our
troubles, to make a return for having so
often shared in theirs: —

** Neptune with his massive trident made
the walls and foundations shake, and over-
turned the whole city; here most cruel Juno
first holds the Scaean gates."

The Caunians, jealous of the authority of
their own especial gods, arm themselves on
the days of their devotion, and run all about
their precincts cutting and slashing the air
with their swords, by that means to drive
away and banish all foreign gods out of their
territory. Their powers are limited accord-
ing to our necessity; this divinity cures
horses, that men, this the plague, that the
scurf, that the cough; one, one sort of itch,
another another: —

*'At such a rate does false religion create
gods for the most contemptible uses."

This makes the grapes grow, this the waters ;

132 MONTAIGNE

that has presidence over lechery; this the
superintendence over merchandise; for every
sort of artisan a god: this has his province
and credit in the east, that in the west; —

"Here were her arms, here her chariot."

"O sacred Phoehns, who hast sway over
the navel of the earth.'*

*'The Athenians worship Pallas; Minoian
Crete, Diana; Vulcan is worshipped on the
Lemnian shore; Sparta and Mycene adore
Juno; the Arcadians worship Faunus; Mars
in Latium was adored;'*

this deity has only one town or one family
in his possession; that lives alone; this in
company either voluntary or upon neces-
Bity;—

** Temples to the grandson are joined to
that of the great-grandfather;"

there are some so common and mean (for the
number amounts to six-and-thirty thousand)
that they must pack five or six together to
produce one ear of com, and thence take their

MONTAIGNE 133

several names; three to a door, that of the
plank, that of the hinge, and that of the
threshold; four to a child, protectors of his
swathing clouts, his drink, meat, sucking;
some certain, some uncertain and doubtful;
some that are not yet entered paradise: —

**Whom, since we think them not yet
worthy of heaven, we permit to inhabit the
earth we have given/*

There are amongst them physicians, poets,
lawyers: some, a mean betwixt the divine and
human nature, mediators betwixt God and
us; adored with a certain second and diminu-
tive sort of adoration; infinite in titles and
offices; some good, others evil; some old and
decrepit, some that are mortal: for Chrysip-
pus was of opinion that in the last conflagra-
tion of the world all the gods will have to
die except Jupiter. Man forges a thousand
pretty societies betwixt God and him: is
He not his countryman? —

''Crete, the cradle of Jove.**

This is the excuse that, upon consideration

134 MONTAIGNE

of this subject, Scaevola, a high priest, and
Varro, a great divine, in their time make us :
*'That it is necessary the people should be
ignorant of many things that are true, and
believe many things that are false: —

' * Seeing he inquires into the truth, so that
he may be made free, 'tis thought fit he would
be deceived."

Human eyes cannot perceive things but by
the forms they know: and do we not remem-
ber what a leap miserable Phaeton took for
attempting to govern the reins of his father's
horses with a mortal handt Our mind falls
into as great a profundity, and is after the
same manner bruised and shattered by its
own temerity. If you ask philosophy of what
matter is heaven, of what the sun, what
answer will she return, but that it is of iron,
with Anaxagoras of stone, or some other
matter that she makes use of? If a man in-
quire of Zeno what Nature isf *' A mechanical
fire," says he, ** proper for generation, pro-
ceeding regularly." Archimedes, master of
that science which attributes to itself the
precedence before all others for truth and

MONTAIGNE 135

certainty: 'Hhe sun," says he, *'is a god of
red-hot iron." Was not this a fine imagina-
tion, extracted from the beauty and inevit-
able necessity of geometrical demonstrations?
yet not so inevitable and useful, but that
Socrates thought it was enough to know so
much of geometry only as to measure the
land a man bought or sold; and that Polyae-
nus, who had been a great and famous master
in it, despised it as full of falsity and mani-
fest vanity, after he had once tasted the deli-
cate fruits of the effeminate garden of Epi-
curus. Socrates in Xenophon concerning this
proposition of Anaxagoras, reputed by an-
tiquity learned above all others in celestial
and divine matters, says that he had disor-
dered his brain, as all men do who too im-
moderately search into knowledges which
nothing appertain unto them: when he made
the sun to be a burning stone, he did not con-
sider that a stone does not shine in the fire;
and which is worse,,, that it will there con-
sume; and in making the sun and fire one,
that fire does not turn complexions black in
shining upon them; that we are able to look
fixedly upon fire: and that fire kills herbs and

136 MONTAIGNE

plants. 'Tis Socrates' opinion, and mine too,
that it is best judged of heaven not to judge
of it at all. Plato having occasion in his
Timaeus to speak of daemons: "This under-
taking," says he, *' exceeds our ability; we
are to believe those ancients who said they
were begotten by them: 'tis against reason to
refuse faith to the children of the gods,
though what they say should not be proved
by any necessary or probable reasons, seeing
they engaged to speak of domestic and quite
familiar things."

Let us see if we have a little more light in
the knowledge of human and natural things.
Is it not a ridiculous attempt for us to devise
for those, to whom by our own confession our
knowledge is not able to attain, another body,
and to lend a false form of our own inven-
tion: as is manifest in the motion of the
planets, to which, seeing our wits cannot
possibly arrive nor conceive their natural
conduct, we lend them material, heavy, and
substantial springs of our own, by which to
move: —

**A golden beam, wheels of gold, silver
spokes ' ' —

MONTAIGNE 137

you would say that we had had coach-makers,
wheelwrights, and painters that went up on
high to make engines of various movements,
and to range the wheels and interlacings of
the heavenly bodies of differing colors about
the axis of Necessity, according to Plato: —

**The world is the great home of all things,
which five thundering zones enfold, through
which a girdle, painted with twelve glittering
constellations, shines high in the oblique
roof, marks the diurnal course, and receives
the biga of the moon:"

these are all dreams and fantastic follies.
Why will not Nature please, once for all, to
lay open her bosom to us, and plainly dis-
cover to us the means and conduct of her
movements, and prepare our eyes to see
them? Good God! what blunders, what mis-
takes should we discover in our poor science!
I am mistaken if it apprehend any one thing
as it really is: and I shall depart hence more
ignorant of all other things than of my own
ignorance.

Have I not read in Plato this divine say-
ing, that ''Nature is nothing but an enigmatic

138 MONTAIGNE

poesy T" as if a man might, peradventure,
say, a veiled and shaded picture, breaking
out here and there with an infinite variety of
false lights to puzzle our conjectures: —

"All those things lie concealed and in-
volved in so caliginous an obscurity, that no
point of human wit can be so sharp as to
pierce heaven or penetrate the earth."

And certainly philosophy is no other than a
sophisticated poesy. "Whence do the ancient
writers extract their authorities but from the
poets? and the first of them were poets them-
selves, and wrote accordingly. Plato him-
self is but a disconnected poet: Timon in-
juriously calls him the great forger of
miracles. All superhuman sciences make use
of the poetic style. Just as women for them-
selves make use of teeth of ivory where the
natural are wanting, and instead of their true
complexion make one of some foreign mat-
ter; legs of cloth or felt, and plumpness of
cotton, and in the sight and knowledge of
every one paint, patch, and trick up them-
selves with false or borrowed beauty: so does
science (and even our law itself has, they

MONTAIGNE 139

say, legal fictions whereon it builds the truth
of its justice); she gives us, in presupposi-
tion and for current pay, things which she
herself informs us were invented: for these
epicycles, excentric and concentric, which
astrology makes use of to carry on the
motions of the stars, she gives us as the best
she could contrive upon that subject; as also,
in all the rest, philosophy presents us, not
that which really is or what she really be-
lieves, but what she has contrived with the
most plausible likelihood and the fairest
aspect. Plato upon the subject of the state
of human bodies and those of beasts: "I
should know that what I have said is truth,**
says he, '*had I the confirmation of an oracle:
but this I will affirm, that what I have said
is the most likely to be true of anything I
could say.**

'Tis not to heaven only that she sends her
ropes, engines, and wheels; let us consider
a little what she says of ourselves and of our
contexture: there is not more retrogradation,
trepidation, accession, recession, aberration,
in the stars and celestial bodies than they
have found out in this poor little human body.

140 MONTAIGNE

Truly they have good reason upon that very
account to call it the Little World, so many
tools and parts have they employed to erect
and build it. To accommodate the motions
they see in man, the various functions and
faculties that we find in ourselves, into how
many parts have they divided the soul! in
how many places lodged, into how many
orders have they divided, to how many
stories have they raised this poor creature
man, besides those that are natural and to be
perceived? and how many offices and voca-
tions have they assigned him? They make
of him an imaginary public thing; 'tis a sub-
ject that they hold and handle; and they have
full power granted to them to rip, place, dis-
place, piece, and stuff it, every one accord-
ing to his own fancy, and yet to this day they
possess it not. They cannot, not in reality
only but even in dreams, so govern it that
there will not be some cadence or sound that
will escape their architecture, enormous as it
is, and botched with a thousand false and
fantastic patches. And it is not reason to ex-
cuse them; for though we are content with
painters when they paint heaven, earth, seas,

MONTAIGNE 141

mountains, remote islands, if they gave ns
but some slight mark of them, and, as of
things unknown, are satisfied with a feigned
and obscure shadowing forth; yet when they
come to draw us by the life, or any other sub-
ject which is known and familiar to us, we
then require of them a perfect and exact rep-
resentation of lineaments and colors, and
despise them if they fail in it.

I am very well pleased with the Milesian
girl who, observing the philosopher Thales
to be always contemplating the celestial arch
and with eyes ever gazing upward, laid some-
thing in his way that he might stumble at, to
put him in mind that it would be time to take
up his thoughts about things in the clouds
when he had provided for those under his
feet. Certes, she advised him very well,
rather to look to himself than to gaze at
heaven; for, as Democritus says, by the mouth
of Cicero: —

'*No man regards what is under his feet;
they are always prying towards heaven."

But our condition will have it so, that the
knowledge of what we have in hand is as

142 MONTAIGNE

remote from us, and as much above the clouds
as that of the stars : as Socrates says in Plato,
that whoever tampers with philosophy may
be reproached, as Thales was by the woman,
that he sees nothing of that which is before
him; for every philosopher is ignorant of
what his neighbor does; yes, and of what he
does himself, and is ignorant of what they
both are, whether beasts or men.

And these people who find Sebonde's argu-
ments too weak, who are ignorant of noth-
ing, who govern the world, and who know
all things: —

"What governs the sea, what rules the
year, whether the planets move spontaneously
or under compulsion, what obscures the
moon, what the concordant discord of all
things will or can effect;**

have they not sometimes in their books
sounded the difficulties they have met with of
knowing their own being? We see very well
that the finger moves, that the foot moves,
that some parts have motion of themselves
without our leave, and that others work by
our direction; that one sort of apprehension

MONTAIGNE 143

occasions blushing, another paleness ; such an
imagination works upon the spleen only,
another upon the brain; one occasions laugh-
ter, another tears; another stupefies and
astounds all our senses and arrests the move-
ment of our members; at one object the
stomach will rise, at another a member that
lies somewhat lower: but how a spiritual im-
pression should make such a breach into a
massive and solid subject, and the nature of
the connection and contexture of these ad-
mirable springs and movements, never man
yet knew: —

"All things are imcertain in reason, and
concealed in the majesty of nature,'*

says Pliny; and St. Augustin: —

**The manner whereby souls adhere to
bodies is altogether marvellous; and cannot
be conceived by man, and this union is man ; ' '

and yet it is not so much as doubted; for the
opinions of men are received according to
ancient beliefs, by authority and upon trust,
as if it were religion and law: that which is
commonly held about it is an accepted jargon;

144 MONTAIGNE

this assumed truth, with all its clutter of
arguments and proofs, is admitted as a firm
and solid body that is no more to be shaken,
no further to be judged of; on the contrary,
every one, as best he may, corroborates and
fortifies this received belief with the utmost
power of his reason, which is a supple utensil,
pliable and to be accommodated to any figure:
and thus the world comes to be filled with
lies and fopperies. The reason that men do
not doubt of so few things is that they never
examine common impressions; they do not
dig to the root where the faults and weak-
ness lie; they only debate about the branches:
they do not ask whether such and such a
thing be true, but if it has been so and so
understood; it is not inquired whether Galen
said anything to purpose, but whether he
said this or that. In truth, there was very
good reason that this curb and constraint on
the liberty of our judgments and this tyranny
over our beliefs should be extended to the
schools and arts ; the god of scholastic knowl-
edge is Aristotle; 'tis irreligion to question
any of his decrees, as it was those of Lycur-
gus at Sparta; his doctrine is magisterial law,

MONTAIGNE 145

-which, peradventure, is as false as another.
I do not know why I should not as willingly
accept either the ideas of Plato, or the atoms
of Epicurus, or the plenum and vacuum of
Leucippus and Democritus, or the water of
Thales, or the infinity of nature of Anaxi-
mander, or the air of Diogenes, or the num-
bers and symmetry of Pythagoras, or the
infinity of Parmenides, or the One of
Musaeus, or the water and fire of Apollo-
dorus, or the similar parts of Anaxagoras, or
the discord and friendship of Empedocles,
or the fire of Heraclitus, or any other opinion
of that infinite confusion of opinions and de-
terminations which this fine human reason
produces by its certitude and clear-sighted-
ness in everything it meddles withal, as I
should the opinion of Aristotle upon this sub-
ject of the principles of natural things; which
principles he builds of three pieces, matter,
form, and privation. And what can be more
vain than to make inanity itself the cause
of the production of things? privation is a
negative : by what fancy could he make them
the cause and original of things that are?
And yet all this was not to be controverted,

146 MONTAIGNE

but as an exercise of logic; nothing was to be
discussed to bring it into doubt, but only to
defend the author of the school from foreign
objections: his authority is the non ultra,
beyond which it was not permitted to in-
quire.

It is very easy upon granted foundations to
build whatever we please: for according to
the law and ordering of this beginning, the
other parts of the structure are easily carried
on without any mishap. By this way, we find
our reason well-grounded and discourse at a
venture; for our masters prepossess and
gain beforehand as much room in our
belief as is necessary for them
towards concluding afterwards what they
please, as geometricians do by their
postulates; the consent and approbation we
allow them, giving them power to draw us to
the right and left, and to whirl us about at
their own pleasure. Whoever is believed
upon his presuppositions is our master and
our god : he will take the level of his founda-
tions so ample and so easy that by them he
may mount us up to the clouds, if he so please.
In this practice and conmiunication of science

MONTAIGNE 147

we have taken the saying of Pythagoras,
*'that every expert ought to be believed in
his own art," for currency; the dialectician
refers the signification of words to the gram-
marian; the rhetorician borrows the state of
arguments from the dialectician; the poet his
measures from the musician; the geometri-
cian his proportions from the arithmetician;
the metaphysicians take physical conjectures
as their foundations; for every science has
its principles presupposed, by which human
judgment is everywhere limited. If you drive
against the barrier where the principal error
lies, they have presently this sentence in
their mouths; ''that there is no disputing
with persons who deny principles;" now men
can have no principles, if not revealed to
them by the Divinity; of all the rest, the be-
ginning, the middle and the end are nothing
but dream and vapor. To those who con-
tend upon presupposition, we must, on the
contrary, presuppose to them the same axiom
upon which the dispute is: for every human
presupposition, and every declaration has as
much authority one as another, if reason does
not make the difference. Wherefore they are

148 MONTAIGNE

all to be put into the balance, and first the
general and those that tyrannize over ns. The
persuasion of certainty is a certain testimony
of folly and extreme uncertainty; and there
are not a more foolish sort of men, nor that
are less philosophers, than the Philodoxes of
Plato: we must inquire whether fire be hot,
whether snow be white, if we know of any
such things as hard or soft.

And as to those answers of which they
made old stories; as to him who doubted if
there were any such thing as heat, whom they
bid throw himself into the fire; and to him
who denied the coldness of ice, whom they
bade to put a cake of ice into his bosom; these
are pitiful things, altogether imworthy of the
profession of philosophy. If they had let us
alone in our natural state, to receive the ap-
pearance of things without us according as
they present themselves to us by our senses,
and had permitted us to follow our own
natural appetites, simple and regulated by
the condition of our birth, they might have
had reason to talk at that rate; but 'tis from
them that we have learned to make ourselves
judges of the world; 'tis from them that we

MONTAIGNE 149

derive this fancy, ''that human reason is
controller-general of all that is without and
within the roof of heaven, that comprehends
everything, that can do everything, by the
means of which everything is known and un-
derstood." This answer would be good
amongst cannibals, who enjoy the happiness
of a long, quiet, and peaceable life without
Aristotle's precepts, and without the knowl-
edge of the name of physics; this answer
would, peradventure, be of more value and
greater force than all those they borrow
from their reason and invention; of this all
animals would be capable with us, and all
things where the power of the law of nature
is yet pure and simple ; but this they have re-
nounced. They must not tell us, ''It is true,
for you see and feel it to be so:" they must
tell me whether I really feel what I think
I feel; and if I do feel it, they must then tell
me why I feel it, and how, and what; let them
tell me the name, original, parts and junc-
tures of heat and cold; the qualities of agent
and patient ; or let them give up their profes-
sion, which is not to admit or approve of
anything but by the way of reason; that is

150 MONTAIGNE

their test in all sorts of essays : but, certainly,
*tis a test full of falsity, error, weakness, and
defect.

How can we better prove this than by
itself? if we are not to believe her, when
speaking of herself, she can hardly be thought
fit to judge of foreign things: if she know
anything, it must at least be her own being
and abode; she is in the soul, and either a
part or an effect of it; for true and essential
reason, from which we by a false color bor-
row the name, is lodged in the bosom of the
Almighty; there is her habitation and retreat,
His thence she imparts her rays, when God is
pleased to impart any beam of it to mankind,
as Pallas issued from her father's head to
communicate herself to the world.

Now let us see what human reason tells us
of herself, and of the soul : not of the soul in
general, of which almost all philosophy makes
the celestial and first bodies participants ; nor
of that which Thales attributed even to
things reputed inanimate, drawn on so to do
by the consideration of the loadstone; but o^
that which appertains to us, and that we
ought the best to know: —

MONTAIGNE 151

**None know the nature of the soul,
whether it be bom with ns, or be infused into
us at our birth; whether it dies with us, or
descends to the shades below, or whether the
gods transmit it into other animals.'*

Crates and Dicaearchus were taught by it,
that there was no soul at all, but that the body
stirs by a natural motion; Plato, that it was
a substance moving of itself: Thales, a
nature without repose: Asclepiades, an exer-
cising of the senses: Hesiod and Anaximan-
der, a thing composed of earth and water;
Parmenides, of earth and fire; Empedocles, of
blood: —

** He vomits his bloody soul;"

Posidonius, Cleanthes, and Galien, that it was
heat or a hot complexion: —

** Their vigor is of fire, and a heavenly
birth;"

Hippocrates, a spirit diffused all over the
body; Varro, that it was an air received at
the mouth, heated in the lungs, moistened in
the heart, and diffused throughout the whole

152 MONTAIGNE

body; Zeno, the quintessence of the four ele-
ments; Heraclides Ponticus, that it was the
light; Xenocrates and the Egyptians, a mov-
able number; the Chaldaeans, a virtue with-
out any determinate form;

**That there is a certain vital habit which
the Oreeks call a hannony;**

let us not forget Aristotle, who held the soul
to be that which naturally causes the body to
move, which he calls Entelechia, with as cold
an invention as any of the rest; for he neither
speaks of the essence, nor of the original,
nor of the nature of the soul, but only takes
notice of the effect; Lactantius, Seneca, and
most of the dogmatists, have confessed that
it was a thing they did not understand; and
after all this enumeration of opinions,

"Of these opinions, which is the true, let
some God determine,'*

says Cicero ; I know, by myself, says St. Ber-
nard, how incomprehensible God is, seeing I
cannot comprehend the parts of my own
being. Heraclitus, who was of opinion that

MONTAIGNE 153

every place was full of souls and demons,
nevertheless maintained that no one could
advance so far towards the knowledge of the
soul as ever to arrive at it, so profound was
its essence.

Neither is there less controversy and de-
bate about locating it. Hippocrates and
Hierophilus place it in the ventricle of the
brain; Democritus and Aristotle throughout
the whole body:

"As when good health is often said to be
a part of the body, whereas of a healthy man
'tis no part.'*

Epicurus, in the stomach;

**This is the seat of terror and fear; here
is the place where joys exist:"

the Stoics, about and within the heart;
Arasistratus, adjoining the membrane of the
epicranion: Empedocles, in the blood, as also
Moses, which was the reason why he inter-
dicted eating the blood of beasts, because the
soul is there seated: Strato placed it betwixt
the eyebrows: —

154 MONTAIGNE

*'What figure the soul is of, or what part it
inhabits, is not to be inquired into,"

says Cicero. I very willingly deliver this
author to you in his own words : for why spoil
the language of eloquence? besides that it
were no great prize to steal the matter of his
inventions; they are neither very frequent,
nor of any great weight, and sufficiently
known. But the reason why Chrysippus
argues it to be about the heart, as all the rest
of that sect do, is not to be omitted. "It is,"
says he, * ' because when we would affirm any-
thing, we lay our hand upon our breasts; and
when we will pronounce me, which signi-
fies I, we let the lower mandible sink towards
the stomach." This place ought not to be
over-slipped without a remark upon the
futility of so great a man; for besides that
these considerations are infinitely light in
themselves, the last is only a proof to the
Greeks that they have their souls lodged in
that part: no human judgment is so vigilant
that it does not sometime sleep. Why should
we be afraid to speak? We see the Stoics,
fathers of human prudence, have found out

MONTAIGNE 155

that the soul of a man crushed under a ruin,
long labors and strives to get out, like a
mouse caught in a trap, before it can disen-
gage itself from the burden. Some hold that
the world was made to give bodies, by way
of punishment, to the spirits, fallen by their
own fault, from the purity wherein they had
been created, the first creation having been
no other than incorporeal; and that accord-
ing as they are more or less remote from their
spirituality, so are they more or less lightly
or heavily incorporated, and that thence pro-
ceeds the variety of so much created matter.
But the spirit that, for his punishment, was
invested with the body of the sun, must cer-
tainly have a very rare and particular
measure of thirst.

The extremities of our perquisition all fall
into and terminate in a misty astonishment,
as Plutarch says, of the testimony of his-
tories, that as in charts and maps the utmost
bounds of known countries are filled up with
marshes, impenetrable forests, deserts, and
uninhabitable places; and this is the reason
why the most gross and childish ravings are
most found in those authors who treat of the

156 MONTAIGNE

most elevated subjects, and proceed the
furthest in them, losing themselves in their
own curiosity and presumption. The be-
ginning and the end of knowledge are equally
foolish: observe to what a pitch Plato flies
in his poetic clouds; take notice there of the
jargon of the gods; but what did he dream of
when he defined man to be a two-legged
animal, without feathers: giving those who
had a mind to deride him, a pleasant oc-
casion; for, having pulled off the feathers of
a live capon, they went about calling it the
Man of Plato.

And what of the Epicureans? out of what
simplicity did they first imagine that their
atoms, which they said were bodies having
some weight and a natural motion downward,
had made the world: till they were put in
mind by their adversaries that, according to
this description, it was impossible they should
unite and join to one another, their fall being
so direct and perpendicular, and producing
parallel lines throughout? wherefore they
were fain thereafter to add a fortuitous and
lateral motion, and moreover, to furnish
their atoms with hooked tails, by which they

MONTAIGNE 157

might unite and cling* to one another; and
even then do not those who attack them upon
this second invention put them hardly to it?
**If the atoms have by chance formed so
many sorts of figures, why did it never fall
out that they made a house or a shoel why, at
the same rate, should we not believe that an
infinite number of Greek letters, strewn all
over a place, might fall into the contexture
of the IHadl"

"Whatever is capable of reason,^' says
Zeno, **is better than that which is not
capable: there is nothing better than the
world: the world is therefore capable of rea-
son." Cotta, by this same argumentation,
makes the world a mathematician; and 'tis
also made a musician and an organist by this
other argumentation of Zeno: "The whole
is more than a part; we are capable of wis-
dom, and are part of the world : therefore the
world is wise." There are infinite like ex-
amples, not merely of arguments that are
false in themselves, but silly; that do not
hold together, and that accuse their authors
not so much of ignorance as of imprudence,
in the reproaches the philosophers throw in

158 MONTAIGNE

one another's teeth upon the dissensions in
their opinions and sects.

Whoever should accumulate a sufficient
fardel of the fooleries of human wisdom,
might tell wonders. I willingly muster these
few as patterns in their way not less profit-
able than more moderate instructions. Let
us judge by these what opinion we are to have
of man, of his sense and reason, when in
these great persons, who have raised human
knowledge so high, so many gross and mani-
fest errors and defects are to be found!

For my part, I would rather believe that
they have treated of knowledge casually, and
as a toy with both hands, and have contended
about reason as of a vain and frivolous in-
strument, setting on foot all sorts of inven-
tions and fancies, sometimes more sinewy,
and sometimes weaker. This same Plato, who
defines man as if he were a fowl, says else-
where, after Socrates, ''that he does not, in
truth, know what man is, and that he is a
member of the world the hardest to under-
stand.'* By this variety and instability of
opinions, they tacitly lead us as it were by
the hand to this resolution of their irresolu-

MONTAIGNE 159

tion. They profess not always to deliver
their opinions barefaced and apparent; they
have one while disguised them in the fabulous
shadows of poesy, and another while under
some other mask: our imperfection carries
this also along with it, that raw meat is not
always proper for our stomachs; we must
dry, alter, and mix it. These men do the
same; they often conceal their real opinions
and judgments, and falsify them to accom-
modate themselves to the public use. They
will not make an open profession of ignor-
ance and of the imbecility of human reason,
that they may not frighten children; but they
sufficiently discover it to us under the ap-
pearance of a troubled and inconstant science.
I advised a person in Italy, who had a
great mind to speak Italian, that provided he
only had a desire to make himself imder-
stood, without being ambitious otherwise to
excel, that he should simply make use of the
first words that came to the tongue's end,
Latin, French, Spanish or Gascon, and then
by adding the Italian termination, he could
not fail of hitting upon some idiom of the
country, either Tuscan, Roman, Venetian,

160 MONTAIGNE

Piedmontese, or Neapolitan, and to apply
himself to some one of those many forms; I
say the same of philosophy: she has so many
faces, so much variety, and has said so many
things, that all onr dreams and fantasies are
there to be found; human imagination can
conceive nothing good or bad that is not
there: —

"Nothing can be so absurdly said, that is
not said by some of the philosophers. ' *

And I am the more willing to expose my own
whimsies to the public, forasmuch as though
they are spun out of myself and without any
pattern, I know they will be found related
to some ancient humor, and there will be no
want of some one to say, "That's whence he
took it." My manners are natural; I have
not called in the assistance of any discipline
to frame them: but weak as they are, when
it came into my head to lay them open to the
world's view, and that, to expose them to the
light in a little more decent garb, I went
about to help them with reasons and ex-
amples: it was a wonder to myself inci-
dentally to find them conformable to so many

MONTAIGNE 161

philosophical discourses and examples. I
learned not what was my mle of life, till it
was worn out and spent: a new figure, an im-
premeditate and accidental philosopher.

But to return to our soul; that Plato has
placed reason in the brain, anger in the heart,
and concupiscence in the liver, 'tis likely that
it was rather an interpretation of the move-
ments of the soul than that he intended a
division and separation of it, as of a body,
into several members. And the most likely
of their opinions is, that 'tis always a soul,
that, by its faculty, reasons, remembers, com-
prehends, judges, desires, and exercises all
its other operations by divers instruments of
the body; as the pilot guides his ship accord-
ing to his experience of it; now tightening,
now slacking the cordage, one while hoisting
the mainyard or moving the rudder, by one
and the same power carrying on so many
several effects: and that it is lodged in the
brain, which appears from this that the
woimds and accidents which touch that part
immediately offend the faculties of the soul;
and 'tis not incongruous that it should thence
diffuse itself into the other parts of the
body: —

162 MONTAIGNE

"Phoebus never deviates from his central
way, yet enlightens all things with his rays;**

as the sun sheds from heaven its light and
influence, and fills the world with them: —

**The other part of the soul, diffused all
over the body, obeys the divinity and great
name of the mind.'*

Some have said, that there was a general
soul, as it were a great body, from which all
the particular souls were extracted, and
thither again returned, always restoring
themselves to that universal matter: —

"They believe that God circulates through
all the earth, sea, and high heavens; hence
cattle, men, flocks, every kind of wild ani-
mals, draw the breath of life, and thither re-
turn when the body is dissolved: nor is there
any death:**

others, that they only rejoined and reunited
themselves to it; others, that they were pro-
duced from the divine substance; others, by
the angels of fire and air: others, that they
were from all antiquity; some, that they were
created at the very point of time the bodies

MONTAIGNE 163

wanted them; others made them descend
from the orb of the moon, and return thither;
the generality of the ancients, that they were
begotten from father to son, after a like man-
ner and production with all other natural
things; raising their argument from the like-
ness of children to their fathers;

"The strong spring from the strong and
good;"

and that we see descend from fathers to their
children, not only bodily marks, but moreover
a resemblance of humors, complexions, and
inclinations of the soul: —

**For why should ferocity ever spring from
the fierce lion's seed? why craft from the fox?
why fear from the stag? Why should his
readiness to fly descend to him from his
father.? . . . but that the soul has germs like
the body, and still increases as the body in-
creases!"

that thereupon the Divine justice is grounded,
punishing in the children the faults of their
fathers : forasmuch as the contagion of pater-
nal vices is in some sort imprinted in the soul

164 MONTAIGNE

of children, and that the disorders of their
will extend to them: moreover, that if sonls
had any other derivation than a natural con-
sequence, and that they had been some other
thing out of the body, they would retain some
memory of their first being, the natural facul-
ties that are proper to them of discoursing,
reasoning, and remembering being consid-
ered:—

** If it be infused in our bodies at our birth,
why do we retain no memory of our preceding
life, and why not remember anything we did
before?'*

for to make the condition of our souls such
as we would have it to be, we must presup-
pose them all-knowing, when in their natural
simplicity and purity; and, this being so,
they had been such, while free from the
prison of the body, as well before they en-
tered into it, as we hope they shall be after
they are gone out of it: and this former
knowledge, it should follow, they should re-
member being yet in the body, as Plato said,
**That what we learn is no other than a re-
membrance of what we knew before;" a thing

MONTAIGNE 165

which every one by experience may maintain
to be false; forasmuch in the first place, as we
remember what we have been taught: and
as, if the memory purely performed its office,
it would at least suggest to us something
more than what we have been taught; sec-
ondly, that which she knew, being in her
purity, was a true knowledge, knowing
things, as they are, by her divine intelli-
gence: whereas here we make her receive
falsehood and vice, when we tell her of these,
and herein she cannot employ her reminis-
cence, that image and conception having
never been planted in her. To say that the
corporeal presence so suffocates her natural
faculties that they are there utterly ex-
tinguished, is, first, contrary to this other be-
lief of acknowledging her power to be so
great, and those operations of it that men
sensibly perceive in this life to be so ad-
mirable, as to have thereby concluded this
divinity and past eternity, and the immortal-
ity to come: —

'*For if the mind is so changed that it has
lost all memory of past things, this, I confess,
appears to me not far from death."

166 MONTAIGNE

Furthermore 'tis here with us, and not else-
where, that the powers and effects of the soul
ought to be considered: all the rest of her per-
fections are vain and useless to her; 'tis by
her present condition that all her immortality
is to be rewarded and paid, and of the life
of man only that she is to render an account.
It had been injustice to have stripped her of
her means and power; to have disarmed her,
in order in the time of her captivity and im-
prisonment, of her weakness and infirmity,
in the time wherein she is under force and
constraint, to pass my sentence and condem-
nation of infinite and perpetual duration; and
insist, upon the consideration of so short a
time, peradventure a life of but an hour or
two, or at the most but of a century, which
have no more proportion to infinity than an
instant: from this momentary interval, to
ordain and definitely determine her whole
being: it were an unreasonable disproportion
to acquire an eternal recompense in return
for so short a life. Plato, to save himself
from this inconvenience, will have future re-
wards limited to the term of a hundred years,
relatively to human duration; and among

MONTAIGNE 167

ourselves several have given them temporal
limits: by this they judged that the genera-
tion of the soul followed the common condi-
tion of human things, as also her life, accord-
ing to the opinion of Epicurus and Demo-
critus, which has been the most received, pur-
suant to these fine notions : that we see it bom
as soon as the body is capable of it; that we
see it increase in vigor as the corporeal vigor
increases; that its feebleness in infancy is very
manifest, then its better form and maturity,
and finally, its declensions in old age, and its
decrepitude: —

**We see that the mind is bom with the
body, with it increases, and with it decays:"

they perceived it to be capable of divers
passions, and agitated with several painful
motions, whence it fell into lassitude and un-
easiness; capable of alteration and change,
of cheerfulness, of dulness, of faintness; sub-
ject to diseases and injuries of its own, as the
stomach or the foot: —

"We see sick minds cured as well as sick
bodies by the help of medicines:"

168 MONTAIGNE

dazzled and intoxicated with the fumes of
wine; jostled from her seat by the vapors of
a burning fever; laid asleep by the applica-
tion of some medicaments, and roused by
others: —

"The soul must, of necessity, be corporeal,
for we see it suffer from wounds and blows:"

they saw it astounded and all its faculties
overthrown by the mere bite of a mad dog,
and, in that condition, to have no such sta-
bility of reason, no such sufficiency, no such
virtue, no philosophical resolution, no such
resistance as could exempt it from the sub-
jection of these accidents; the slaver of a con-
temptible cur, shed upon the hand of
Socrates, to shake all his wisdom and all his
so great and well-regulated imaginations, and
so to annihilate them as that there remained
no trace or footstep of his former knowl-
edge:—

**The power of the soul is disturbed, over-
thrown, and distracted by the same poison:"

and this poison to find no more resistance in
this great soul than in that of an infant of

MONTAIGNE 169

four years old : a poison sufficient to make all
philosophy, if it were incarnate, furious and
mad; insomuch that Cato, so stiff-necked
against death and fortune, could not endure
the sight of a looking-glass or of water, con-
founded with horror and affright at the dan-
ger of falling, by the contagion of a mad dog,
into the disease called by physicians hydro-
phobia:—

''The violence of the disease diffused
throughout the limbs, disturbs the soul, as
in the salt sea the foaming waves rage with
the force of the strong winds.'*

Now, as to this particular, philosophy has
sufficiently armed man to encounter all other
accidents, either with patience, or if the
search of that costs too dear, by an infallible
defeat, in totally depriving himself of all
sentiment; but these are expedients, that are
only of use to a soul being itself and in its
full power, capable of reason and delibera-
tion: but not at all proper for this incon-
venience, where even in a philosopher, the
soul becomes the soul of a madman, troubled,
overturned, and lost: which many occasions

170 MONTAIGNE

may produce, as a too vehement agitation
that any violent passion of the soul may beget
in itself, or a wound in a certain part of the
person, or vapors from the stomach, any of
which may stupefy the understanding and
turn the brain; —

"In the ailments of the body the mind
often wanders, grows disordered and wild,
and sometimes by a heavy lethargy is cast
into a profound and everlasting sleep; the
eyes close, the head sinks.**

The philosophers, methinks, have scarcely
touched this string, no more than another of
the same importance; they have this dilemma
continually in their mouths to console our
mortal condition: *'The soul is either mortal
or immortal; if mortal, it will suffer no pain;
if immortal, it will change for the better.**
They never touch the other branch: ''What
if she change for the worse?** And they
leave to the poets the menaces of future tor-
ments; but thereby they make for themselves
a good game. These are two omissions that
I often meet with in their discourses: I re-
turn to the first.

MONTAIGNE 171

This soul loses the use of the sovereign
stoical good, so constant and so firm: our
fine human wisdom must here yield and give
up its arms. As to the rest, they also con-
sidered, hy the vanity of human reason, that
the mixture and association of two so con-
trary things as the mortal and the immortal,
is unimaginable: —

"For to join the mortal and the eternal,
and think they can agree and discharge
mutual functions, is folly. For what things
are more differing or more distinct betwixt
themselves, and more opposed, than the
mortal and the immortal and enduring joined
together in order to undergo cruel storms?"

Moreover, they perceived the soul declining
in death, as well as the body: —

**It yields up the body to old age:"

which, according to Zeno, the image of sleep
sufficiently demonstrates to us; for he looks
upon it as a fainting and fall of the soul, as
well as of the body: —

**He thinks the mind is contracted, and
that it slips and falls."

172 MONTAIGNE

And what they perceived in some, that the
soul maintained its force and vigor to the
last gasp of life , they attributed to the
variety of diseases ; as it is observable in men
at the last extremity, that some retain one
sense and some another; one the hearing, and
another the smell, without any alteration;
and that there is no so universal a depriva-
tion, that some parts do not remain entire
and vigorous: —

"Not otherwise than if, when a sick man's
foot may be in pain, yet his head be free from
any suffering.'*

The sight of our judgment has the same re-
lation to truth that the owl's eyes have to the
splendor of the sun, says Aristotle. By what
can we better convict it than by so gross
blindness in so apparent a light! For as to
the contrary opinion of the immortality of the
soul, which Cicero says was first introduced,
at all events by the testimony of books, by
Pherecides Syrius in the time of King Tul-
lius, though others attribute it to Thales, and
others to others, 'tis the part of human
science that is treated of with the most doubt

MONTAIGNE 173

and the greatest reservation. The most posi-
tive dogmatists are, on this point, principally
constrained to fly to the refuge of the
Academy. No one knows what Aristotle has
established upon this subject, any more than
all the ancients in general, who handle it with
a wavering belief: —

"A thing more satisfactory in the promise
than in the proof;"

he conceals himself in clouds of words and
difficult and unintelligible fancies, and has
left to his sect as great a dispute about his
judgment as about the matter itself.

Two things rendered this opinion plausi-
ble to them: one, that without the immortality
of souls there would be nothing whereon to
ground the vain hopes of glory, which is a
consideration of wonderful repute in the
world; the other, that it is a very profitable
impression, as Plato says, that vices, though
they escape the discovery and cognizance of
human justice, are still within the reach of
the divine, which will pursue them even after
the death of the guilty. Man is excessively
solicitous to prolong his being, and has, to

174 MONTAIGNE

the utmost of his power, provided for it;
momunents are erected for the conservation
of the body, and from glory to transmit the
name; impatient of his fortune, he has em-
ployed all his wit and opinion in the rebuild-
ing of himself, and in the sustenance of him-
self by his productions. The soul, by reason
of its anxiety and impotence, being unable
to stand by itself, wanders up and down to
seek support in consolations, hopes, and other
external circumstances, to which she adheres
and fixes; and how light or fantastic soever
invention pronounces them to it, relies more
willingly and with greater assurance upon
them, than upon itself. But 'tis wonderful
to observe how short the most constant and
firm maintainers of this just and clear persua-
sion of the immortality of the soul fall, and
how weak their arguments are, when they go
about to prove it by human reason: —

''They are dreams, not of the teacher, but
of the wisher,"

says one of the ancients. By which testi-
mony man may know that he owes the truth
he himself fiinds out to fortune and accident;

MONTAIGNE 175

since, even when it is fallen into his hand, he
has not wherewith to hold and maintain it, and
that his reason has not force to make use of it.
All things produced by our own reasoning
and understanding, whether true or false, are
subject to incertitude and controversy. 'Twas
for the chastisement of our pride, and for the
instruction of our misery and incapacity, that
God wrought the perplexity and confusion of
the old tower of Babel. Whatever we under-
take without His assistance, whatever we see
without the lamp of His grace, is but vanity
and folly; we corrupt and debase by our
weakness the very essence of truth, which is
uniform and constant, when fortune puts it
into our possession. What course soever man
takes of himself, God still permits it to come
to the same confusion, the image whereof He
so vividly represents to us in the just chas-
tisement wherewith He crushed Nimrod's
presumption, and frustrated the vain attempt
of his pyramid: —

**I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and
will bring to nothing the understanding of
the prudent."

176 MONTAIGNE

The diversity of idioms and languages with
which He disturbed this work, what are they
other than this infinite and perpetual alter-
cation and discordance of opinions and rea-
sons, which accompany and confound the vain
building of human wisdom, and to very good
effect ? For what would hold us if we had but
the least grain of knowledge ? This saint has
very much obliged me: —

**The very obscurity of the truth is either
an exercise of humility or a crushing of
pride."

To what a pitch of presumption and insolence
do we raise our blindness and folly!

But to return to my subject: it was truly
very good reason that we should be beholden
to God only, and to the favor of His grace,
for the truth of so noble a belief, since from
His sole bounty we receive the fruit of im-
mortality, which consists in the enjoyment
of eternal beatitude. Let us ingenuously con-
fess that God alone has dictated it to us, and
faith; for 'tis no lesson of nature and our
own reason : and whoever will inquire into his
own being and power, both within and with-

MONTAIGNE 177

out, otherwise than by this divine privilege:
whoever shall consider man impartially and
without flattery, will see nothing in him of
efficacy or faculty that relishes of anything
but death and earth. The more we give, and
confess to owe and render to God, we do it
with the greater Christianity. That which
this Stoic philosopher says he holds from the
fortuitous consent of the popular voice, had
it not been better had he held it from God? —

''When we discourse of the inamortality of
minds, the consent of men that either fear
or adore the infernal powers is of no small
moment. I make use of this public persua-
sion."

Now, the weakness of human arguments
upon this subject is particularly manifested
by the fabulous circumstances they have
superadded as consequences of this opinion,
to find out of what condition this immortality
of ours was. Let us omit the Stoics: —

''They give us the enjoyment (of life), as
they do to crows; they say that minds shall
continue long, that they shall continue always
they deny:"

178 MONTAIGNE

who gives to soul a life after this, but finite.
The most universal and received fancy, and
which continues down to our times in various
places, is that of which they make Pytha-
goras the author: not that he was the original
inventor, but because it received a great deal
of weight and repute by the authority of his
approbation; and this is, that souls at their
departure out of us do nothing but shift from
one body to another, from a lion to a horse,
from a horse to a king, continually travelling
at this rate from habitation to habitation.
And he himself said that he remembered to
have been Aethalides, since that Euphorbus,
and afterwards Hermotimus, and finally from
Pyrrhus was passed into Pythagoras, having
a memory of himself of two hundred and six
years. Some have added that these very
souls at times remount to heaven and come
down again: —

"0 father, is it to be believed that some
sublime souls should hence mount to heaven
and thence return to lumpish bodies! what
is the so dire affection for life in wretched
(men!)."

MONTAIGNE 179

Origen makes them eternally to go and come,
from a better to a worse estate. The opinion
that Varro makes mention of is, that after
four hmidred and forty years* revolution
they are reunited to their first bodies;
Chrysippus held that this would happen after
a certain space of time unknown and un-
limited. Plato, who professes to have de-
rived from Pindar and the ancient poets the
belief that souls are to undergo infinite vicis-
situdes of mutation, for which the soul is pre-
pared, having neither punishment nor reward
in the other world, but what is temporal, as
its life here is but temporal, concludes that it
has a singular knowledge of the affairs of
heaven, of hell, of the world, through all
which it has passed, repassed, and made stay
in several voyages; fit matters for her
memory. Observe her progress elsewhere:
**he who has lived well is reunited to the star
to which he is assigned: he who has lived ill
removes into a woman, and, if he does not
there reform, is again removed into a beast of
condition suitable to his vicious manners, and
will see no end of his punishments till he re-

180 MONTAIGNE

tTum to his natural constitution, and has by
the force of reason purged himself from the
gross, stupid, and elementary qualities he was
polluted with." But I will not forget the
objection the Epicureans make against this
transmigration from one body to another;
'tis a pleasant one: they ask, ''What expedi-
ent would be found out if the number of
dying should chance to be greater than that
of those who are coming into the world! for
the souls turned out of their old habitation
would scuffle and crowd which should first get
possession of this new lodging." And they
further demand, *'how they should pass away
their time whilst waiting till a new quarter
were made ready for them: or, on the con-
trary, if more animals should be bom than
die, the bodies, they say, would be but in an
ill condition whilst awaiting a soul to be in-
fused into them; and it would fall out that
some bodies would die before they had been
alive: —

**In fine, it seems ridiculous that souls
should be always awaiting the coupling and
birth of animals, and that immortals should
in vast numbers crowd about mortal germs,

MONTAIGNE 181

and strive and contend with eagerness which
should first possess them."

Others have arrested the soul in the body of
the deceased, with it to animate serpents,
worms, and other beasts which are said to be
bred out of the corruption of our limbs, and
even out of our ashes; others divide it into
two parts, the one mortal, the other immortal;
others make it corporeal, and nevertheless
immortal; some make it immortal without
science or knowledge. And some have be-
lieved that devils were made of the souls of
the damned, and this has been the fancy of
some among ourselves, as Plutarch thinks
that gods are made of those that are saved;
for there are few things which that author is
80 positive in as he is in this; ever maintain-
ing, elsewhere, a doubtful and ambiguous
way of expression. **We are to hold," says
he, ''and steadfastly to believe, that the souls
of virtuous men, both according to nature and
to the divine justice, become saints, and from
saints demi-gods, and from demi-gods, after
they are perfectly, as in sacrifices of purga-
tion, cleansed and purified, being delivered

182 MONTAIGNE

from all passibility and all mortality, they
become, not by any civil decree but in real
tmth, and according to all probability of
reason, entire and perfect gods, receiving a
most happy and glorious end.'* But who
desires to see him, he who is the most sober
and moderate of the whole tribe, lay about
him with greater boldness, and relate his
miracles upon this subject, I refer him to his
Treatise of the Moon, and his Daemon of
Socrates, where he may, as evidently as in
any other place whatever, satisfy himself that
the mysteries of philosophy have many
strange things in common with those of
poesy; the himian understanding losing itself
in attempting to sound and search all things
to the bottom, just as we, tired and worn out
with a long course of life, relapse into in-
fancy. Such are the fine and certain instruc-
tions which we extract from human knowl-
edge concerning the soul.

There is not less temerity in what it teaches
us touching the corporeal parts. Let us
choose one or two examples, for otherwise
we should lose ourselves in this vast and
troubled ocean of medicinal errors. Let us

MONTAIGNE 183

see whether, at least, they agree about the
matter whereof men produce one another;
for as to their first production it is no wonder,
if in a thing so high and so long since past,
human understanding finds itself perplexed
and dissipated. Archelaus the naturalist,
whose disciple and favorite Socrates was, ac-
cording to Aristoxenus, said, that both men
and beasts were made of a lacteous slime, ex-
pressed by the heat of the earth: Pythagoras
says, that our seed is the foam of our better
blood: Plato, that it is the distillation of the
marrow of the backbone, which he argues
from the circumstance that that part is first
sensible of being weary of the work : Alcmeon,
that it is part of the substance of the brain,
and this is shown, says he, inasmuch as it
causes weakness of the eyes in those who im-
moderately labor in that exercise: Demo-
critus, that it is a substance extracted from
the whole mass of the body: Epicurus, that it
is extracted from soul and body: Aristotle, an
excrement drawn from the aliment of the
blood, the last which is diffused through our
members: others, that it is blood concocted
and digested by the heat of the genitories.

184 MONTAIGNE

which they judge by reason that in excessive
endeavors a man voids pure blood; wherein
there seems to be the most likelihood, could
a man extract any probability from so in-
finite a confusion. Now, to bring this seed to
do its work, how many contrary opinions are
set on foot. Aristotle and Democritus are of
opinion that women have no sperm, and that
'tis nothing but a sweat that they distil in
the heat of pleasure and motion, and that
contributes nothing at all to generation:
Galen, on the contrary, and his followers be-
lieve that without the fusion of seeds there
can be no generation. Here, again, are the
physicians, the philosophers, the lawyers, and
the divines by the ears with our wives about
the dispute, for what time women carry their
fruit; and I, for my part, by the example of
myself, side with those who maintain that a
woman goes eleven months with child. The
world is built upon this experience; there is
not so simple a little woman that cannot give
her judgment in all these controversies, and
yet we cannot agree.

Here is enough to verify that man is no
better instructed in the knowledge of him-

MONTAIGNE 185

self in his corporeal than in his spiritual part.
We have proposed himself to himself, and his
reason to his reason, to see what she could
say. I think I have sufficiently demonstrated
how little she understands herself in herself;
and who understands not himself in himself,
in what can he possibly understand? —

*'As if he could understand the measure
of anything that knows not his own."

Truly, Protagoras told us a pretty flam, in
making man the measure of all things who
never knew so much as his own; if it be not
he, his dignity will not permit that any
other creature should have this advantage;
now, he being so contrary in himself, and one
judgment so incessantly subverting another,
this favorable proposition was but a mockery,
which led us necessarily to conclude the
nullity of the compass and the compasser.
When Thales reputes the knowledge of man
very difficult for man, he, at the same time,
gives him to understand, that all other knowl-
edge is impossible to him.

You, for whom I have taken the pains, con-
trary to my custom, to write so long a dis-

186 MONTAIGNE

course, will not refuse to maintain your
Sebonde by the ordinary forms of arguing
wherein you are every day instructed, and
in this will exercise your study. For this
last fencing trick is never to be made use of
but as an extreme remedy; 'tis a desperate
thrust, wherein you are to quit your own
arms to make your adversary abandon his:
and a secret sleight, which must be very
rarely and very reservedly put in practice.
'Tis great temerity to lose yourself, that you
may destroy another; you must not die to be
revenged, as Gobrias did; for, hotly grappling
in combat with a Persian lord, Darius com-
ing in, sword in hand, and fearing to strike
lest he should kill Gobrias, he called out to
him boldly to fall on, though he should nm
them both through at once. I have known
weapons and conditions of single combat,
without quarter, and wherein he who pro-
posed them, put himself and his adversary
upon terms of inevitable death to them both,
censured as unjust. The Portuguese, in the
Indian Sea, took certain Turks prisoners,
who, impatient of their captivity, resolved
(and it succeeded), by striking some ship

MONTAIGNE 187

nails against one another and making a spark
fall into the barrels of powder that were in
the place where they were confined, to blow
np and reduce themselves, their masters, and
the vessel to ashes. We touch here the utmost
limits of the sciences, whose extremity is
vicious, as in virtue. Keep yourselves in the
common road; it is not good to be so subtle
and cunning. Remember the Tuscan
proverb: —

**If you draw your thread too fine, it will
break."

I advise you, in all your opinions and medi-
tations, as well as in your manners and all
other things, to keep yourself moderate and
reserved, and to avoid all novelty and
strangeness: I am an enemy to all out-of-the-
way proceedings. You who by the authority
of your greatness, and yet more by the ad-
vantages which those qualities give you that
are more your own, may, with the twinkle of
an eye, command whom you please, should
give this charge to some professor of letters,
who might, after a much better manner, have
sustained and illustrated these things to you.

188 MONTAIGNE

But here is as much as you will stand in need
of.

Epicurus said of the laws, that the worst
were so necessary for us, that without them
men would devour one another; and Plato
afl&rms, that without laws we should live like
beasts. Our mind is a wandering, dangerous,
and temerarious tool; it is hard to couple any
order or measure to it; and in my time, those
who are endued with some rare excellence
above others, or any extraordinary vivacity
of understanding, we see almost all of them
lash out into license of opinions and manners;
'tis almost a miracle to find one temperate
and socially tractable. There's all the rea-
son in the world to limit the human mind
within the strictest limits possible: in study,
as in all the rest, we ought to have its steps
and advances numbered and fixed, and that
the limits of its inquisition be bounded by
art. It is curbed and fettered by religions,
laws, customs, sciences, precepts, mortal and
immortal penalties and rewards; and yet we
see that by its volubility and dissolvability
it escapes from all these bounds; 'tis a vain

MONTAIGNE 189

body which has nothing to lay hold on; or
to seize a various and difform body, incapable
of being either bound or held. Truly, there
are few souls so regular, firm, and well de-
scended that are to be trusted with their own
conduct, and that can, with moderation and
without temerity, sail in the liberty of their
own judgments beyond the common and re-
ceived opinions: 'tis more expedient to put
them under pupilage. The mind is a danger-
ous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows
not discreetly how to use it: and there is not
a beast to whom a headboard can more
properly be given to keep his looks down and
before his feet, and to hinder him from wan-
dering here and there out of the tracks which
custom and the laws have laid before him:
therefore it will be much better for you to
keep yourself in the beaten path, let it be
what it will, than to fly out at a venture with
this unbridled liberty. If any of these new
doctors should seek to exercise his ingenuity
in your presence, at the expense both of your
soul and his own, to avoid this dangerous
plague, which is every day laid in your way,

190 MONTAIGNE

this preservative, in extremist necessity, will
prevent the contagion of this poison from
offending either you or your company.

The liberty, then, and frolic forwardness
of these ancient wits, produced in philosophy
and human sciences, several sects of different
opinions, each undertaking to judge and
make choice of what he would stick to and
maintain. But now that men go all one way,

**Who are so tied and obliged to certain
beliefs, that they are bound to defend even
those they do not approve,**

and that we receive the arts by civil au-
thority and decree, so that the schools have
but one pattern and a like circumscribed in-
stitution and discipline, we no longer take
notice what the coin weighs and is really
worth, but every one receives it according to
the estimate that the common approbation
and the ordinary course put upon it: the alloy
is not disputed, but for how much it is cur-
rent. In like manner, all things pass ; we take
physic as we do geometry, and tricks of
hocus-pocus, enchantments, codpiece points,
correspondence with the souls of the dead,

MONTAIGNE 191

prognostications, domifications, and even that
ridicnlons pursuit of the philosopher's stone,
all things pass for current pay, without
scruple or contradiction. We need to know
no more but that Mars' house is in the middle
of the triangle of the hand, that of Venus in
the thumb, and that of Mercury in the little
finger; that when the table-line cuts the
tubercle of the forefinger, 'tis a sign of
cruelty; that when it falls short of the mid-
dle finger, and that the natural medium line
makes an angle with the vital in the same
side, 'tis a sign of a miserable death ; that if,
in a woman, the natural line be open, and does
not close the angle with the vital, this de-
notes that she will not be very chaste; I leave
you to judge whether a man, thus qualified,
may not pass with reputation and esteem in
all companies.

Theophrastus said that human knowledge,
guided by the senses, might judge of the
causes of things to a certain degree: but that
being arrived at extreme and first causes, it
must stop short, and retire, by reason either
of its own infirmity, or the difficulty of things.
*Ti8 a moderate and gentle opinion, that our

192 MONTAIGNE

own understanding may conduct us to the
knowledge of some things, and that it has
certain measures of power, beyond which 'tis
temerity to employ it; this opinion is plausi-
ble, and introduced by men of well-composed
minds. But 'tis hard to limit our mind; 'tis
inquisitive and greedy, and will no more stop
at a thousand, than at fifty paces ; having ex-
perimentally found that, wherein one man has
failed, another has hit; that what was un-
known to one age, the age following has ex-
plained: and that arts and sciences are not
cast in a mould, but are formed and perfected
by degrees, by often handling and polishing,
as bears leisurely lick their cubs into shape;
what my force cannot discover, I do not yet
desist to soimd and to try; and, handling and
kneading this new matter over and over
again, turning and heating it, I lay open to
him, that shall succeed me, a kind of facility
to enjoy it more at his ease, and make it more
manageable and supple for him: —

**As Hymettian wax grows softer in the
Bun, and tempered by the fingers assumes
various forms, and is rendered fit for use:"

MONTAIGNE 193

as much will the second do to the third, which
is the reason that difficulty ought not to make
me despair; and my own incapacity as little;
for 'tis only my own.

Man is as capable of all things, as of some:
and if he confess, as Theophrastus says, the
ignorance of first causes and principles, let
him boldly surrender to me all the rest of his
knowledge; if he is defective in foundation,
his reason is on the ground: disputation and
inquisition have no other aim but principles;
if this does not stop his career, he runs into
an infinite irresolution: —

**One thing can be no more or less com-
prehended than another, because there is only
one definition for comprehending all things. ' '

Now 'tis very likely, that if the soul knew
anything, it would in the first place know
itself; and if it knew anything out of itself,
it would be its own body and case, before
anything else: if we see the gods of physic,
to this very day, debating about our
anatomy: —

** Vulcan against, for Troy Apollo stood:'*

194 MONTAIGNE

when are we to expect that they will be
agreed! We are nearer neighbors to our-
selves than the whiteness of snow or the
weight of stones are to us: if man does not
know himself, how should he know his func-
tions and powers? It is not, peradventure,
that we have not some real knowledge in us,
but 'tis by chance; and forasmuch as errors
are received into our soul by the same way,
after the same manner, and by the same con-
duct, it has not wherewithal to distinguish
them, nor wherewithal to choose the truth
from falsehood.

The Academics admitted a certain inclina-
tion of judgment, and thought it too crude
to say, "that it was not more likely that snow
was white than black, and that we were no
more assured of the motion of a stone thrown
by the hand than of that of the eighth
sphere;" and to avoid this difficulty and
strangeness, which can, in truth, not easily
lodge in our imagination, though they con-
clude that we are in no sort capable of knowl-
edge, and that truth is engulfed in so pro-
found an abyss as is not to be penetrated by
human sight; yet do they acknowledge some

MONTAIGNE 195

things to be more likely than others, and re-
ceived into their judgment this faculty that
we have a power to incline to one appearance
more than to another: they allowed this pro-
pension, interdicting all resolution. The
opinion of the Pyrrhonians is more bold, and
also more likely: for this Academic inclina-
tion, and this propension to one proposition
rather than to another, what is it other than
a recognition of some more apparent truth in
this than in that! If our understanding be
capable of the form, lineaments, comport-
ment, and face of truth, it would as well see it
entire as by halves, springing and imperfect:
this appearance of likelihood, which makes
them rather take the left hand than the right,
augments it: multiply this ounce of veri-
similitude that turns the scales, to a hundred,
to a thousand ounces: it will happen in the
end that the balance will itself end the con-
troversy, and determine one choice and one
entire truth. But how is it they suffer them-
selves to incline to and be swayed by proba-
bility, if they know not the truth itself? How
should they know the similitude of that
whereof they do not know the essence!

196 MONTAIGNE

Either we can absolutely judge, or absolutely
we cannot. If our intellectual and sensible
faculties are without foot or foundation, if
they only float and waver about, 'tis to no
purpose that we suffer our judgment to be
carried away by any part of their operation,
what appearance soever it may seem to pre-
sent to us; and the surest and most happy
seat of our understanding would be that
where it kept itself temperate, upright and
inflexible, without tottering and without agi-
tation:—

"As between things that seem true or false,
it signifies nothing to the assent of the mind. ' '

That things do not lodge in us in their form
and essence, and do not there make their
entry by their own force and authority we
sufficiently see: because if it were so, we
should receive them after the same manner:
wine would have the same relish with the sick
as with the healthful; he who has his finger
chapped or benumbed would find the same
hardness in wood or iron that he handles that
another does; outside subjects, then,
submit themselves to our disposal, and

MONTAIGNE 197

are seated in us as we please. Now, if
on our part we received anything without
alteration, if human grasp were capable and
strong enough to seize on truth by our
own means, these being common to all men,
this truth would be conveyed from hand to
hand from one to another; and at least there
would be some one thing to be found in the
world, amongst so many as there are, that
would be believed by men with a universal
consent: but this, that there is no one propo-
sition that is not debated and controverted
amongst us, or that may not be, makes it very
manifest that our natural judgment does not
very clearly comprehend what it embraces;
for my judgment cannot make itself accepted
by the judgment of my companion, which is
a sign that I seized it by some other means
than by a natural power that is in me and in
all other men.

Let us lay aside this infinite confusion of
opinions which we see even amongst the
philosophers themselves, and this perpetual
and universal dispute about the knowledge of
things: for this is very truly presupposed,
that men — I mean those highest and best bom

198 MONTAIGNE

in knowledge and of the greatest parts — are
not agreed about any one thing, not even
that heaven is over our heads, for they that
doubt of everything also doubt of that; and
they who deny that we are able to compre-
hend anything, say that we have not com-
prehended that the heaven is over our heads;
and these two opinions are without com-
parison the stronger in number.

Besides this infinite diversity and division,
through the trouble that our judgment gives
to ourselves, and the uncertainty that every
one is sensible of in himself, 'tis easy to per-
ceive that its seat is very unstable and un-
secure. How variously do we judge of
things'? how often do we alter our opinions!
"What I hold and believe to-day, I hold and
believe with* my whole belief: all my instru-
ments and engines seize and take hold of this
opinion, and become responsible to me for it
as much as in them lies; I could not embrace
nor preserve any truth with greater assur-
ance than I do this; I am wholly and entirely
possessed with it: but has it not befallen me,
not only once, but a thousand times, and
every day, to have embraced some other thing

MONTAIGNE 199

with the same instniments, and in the same
condition, which I have since judged to he
false? A man must, at least, become wise at
his own expense ; if I have often found myself
betrayed under this color, if my touch prove
ordinarily false and my balance unequal and
unjust, what assurance can I now have more
than at other times? is it not folly to suffer
myself to be so often deceived by my guide?
Nevertheless, let fortune remove and shift
us five hundred times from place to place,
let her do nothing but incessantly empty and
fill into our belief, as into a vessel, other and
other opinions, yet still the present and the
last is the one certain and infallible: for this
we must abandon goods, honor, life, health,
and all: —

**The last thing we find out is ever the best,
and makes us disrelish all the former."

Whatever is preached to us, whatever we
learn, we should still remember that it is man
that gives and man that receives ; 'tis a mortal
hand that presents it to us, 'tis a mortal hand
that accepts it. The things that come to us
from heaven have the sole right and authority

200 MONTAIGNE

of persuasion, the sole mark of truth: which
also we do not see with our own eyes nor re-
ceive by our own means: that great and
sacred image could not abide in so wretched
a habitation, if God, for this end, did not pre-
pare it, if God did not, by His particular and
supernatural grace and favor, fortify and re-
form it. At least our frail and defective con-
dition ought to make us comport ourselves
with more reservedness and moderation in
our innovations and changes: we ought to
remember that whatever we receive into the
understanding we often receive things that
are false, and that it is by the same instru-
ments that so often give themselves the lie,
and are so often deceived.

Now, it is no wonder they should so often
contradict themselves, being so easy to be
turned and swayed by very light occurrences.
It is certain that our apprehension, our judg-
ment, and the faculties of the soul in general,
suffer according to the movements and altera-
tions of the body, which alterations are con-
tinual: are not our wits more sprightly, our
memory more prompt, our discourse more
lively, in health than in sickness? Do not joy

MONTAIGNE 201

and gaiety make us receive subjects that
present themselves to our souls, quite other-
wise than care and melancholy? Do you be-
lieve that the verses of Catullus or of Sappho
please an old doting miser as they do a vigor-
ous and amorous young man? Cleomenes,
the son of Anaxandridas, being sick, his
friends reproached him that he had humors
and whimsies that were new and unaccus-
tomed: *'I believe it,** said he, "neither am
I the same man now as when I am in health:
being now another thing, my opinions and
fancies are also other than they were before.**
In our courts of justice 'tis said of criminals,
when they find the judges in a good humor,
gentle and mild,

**Let him rejoice in his good fortune.**

For it is most certain that men*s judgments
are sometimes more prone to condemnation,
more sharp and severe, and at others more
facile, easy, and inclined to excuse. He that
carries with him from his house the pain of
the gout, jealousy, or theft by his man, hav-
ing his whole soul possessed with anger, it is
not to be doubted but that his judgment will

202 MONTAIGNE

be warped in that direction. That venerable
senate of the Areopagus was wont to hear and
determine by night, for fear lest the sight of
the parties might corrupt their justice. The
very air itself and the serenity of heaven will
cause some mutation in us, according to the
Greek verses rendered in Cicero: —

**Such are the minds of men, as Father
Jupiter himself has shed light on the earth
with his growing luminary."

'Tis not only fevers, debauches, and great
accidents that overthrow our judgment; the
least things in the world will do it; and we
are not to doubt, though we are not sensible
of it, but that if a continued fever can over-
whelm the soul, a tertian will in some propor-
tionate measure alter it; if an apoplexy can
stupefy and totally extinguish the sight of
our xmderstanding, we are not to doubt but
that a great cold will dazzle it; and conse-
quently there is hardly a single hour in a
man's life wherein our judgment is in its due
place and right condition, our bodies being
subject to so many continual changes, and
replete with so many several sorts of springs,

MONTAIGNE 203

that I believe what the physicians say, how
hard it is but that there will not be always
some one or other out of order.

As to what remains, this malady does not
very easily discover itself, unless it be ex-
treme and past remedy; forasmuch as reason
goes always lame and halting, and that as
well with falsehood as with truth; and there-
fore 'tis hard to discover her deviations and
mistakes. I always call that appearance of
meditation which every one forges in him-
self, reason: this reason, of the condition of
which there may be a hundred contrary ones
about the same subject, is an instrument of
lead and wax, ductile, pliable, and accom-
modable to all sorts of biases and to all
measures, so that nothing remains but the
knowledge how to turn and mould it. How
uprightly soever a judge may resolve to act,
if he do not well look to himself, which few
care to do, his inclination to friendship, to
relationship, to beauty, or revenge, and not
only things of that weight, but even the for-
tuitous instinct that makes us favor one thing
more than another, and that, without the
reason's leave, puts the choice upon us in

204 MONTAIGNE

two equal subjects, or some other shadowy
futility may insensibly insinuate into his
judgment the recommendation or disfavor
of a cause, and make the balance dip.

I, who watch myself as narrowly as I can,
and who have my eyes continually bent upon
myself, like one that has no great business
elsewhere to do: —

** Alone secure, whatever king be dreaded
in the frozen North, or what affrights Tiri-
dates,"

dare hardly tell the vanity and weakness I
find in myself; my foot is so unstable and
stands so slippery, I find it so apt to totter
and reel, and my sight so disordered, that
fasting I am quite another man than when
full; if health and a fair day smile upon me,
I am a very good fellow; if a com trouble my
toe, I am sullen, out of humor, and inacces-
sible. The same pace of a horse seems to me
one while hard and another easy; the same
way, one while shorter and another while
longer; the same form, one while more and
another while less taking. Now I am for
doing everything, and then for doing nothing

MONTAIGNE 205

at all; what pleases me now would be a
trouble to me at another time. I have a
thousand senseless and casual humors within
myself; either I am possessed by melancholy,
or swayed by choler; and, by its own private
authority, now sadness predominates in me,
and now cheerfulness. When I take books, I
have discovered admirable graces in such and
such passages, and such as have struck my
soul: let me light upon them at another time,
I may turn and toss, tumble and rattle the
leaves to much purpose; 'tis then to me a
shapeless and incongruous mass. Even in my
own writings, I do not always find the air of
my first fancy: I know not what I meant to
say; and am often put to it to correct and
pimip for a new sense, because I have lost the
first, that was better. I do nothing but go
and come: my judgment does not always ad-
vance; it floats and wanders: —

"Like a small bark surprised upon the
great sea, when the winds ruffle it."

Very often, as I am apt to do, having for sport
and exercise imdertaken to maintain an
opinion contrary to my own, my mind bend-

206 MONTAIGNE

ing and applying itself that way, so strongly
engages me there, that I no longer discern
the reason of my former belief, and forsake
it. I am, as it were, drawn on to the side to
which I lean, be it what it will, and carried
away by my own weight.

Every one would almost say the same of
himself, if he considered himself as I do;
preachers very well know that the emotions
which steal npon them in speaking animate
them towards belief; and in a passion we are
more stiff in the defence of our proposition,
receive a deeper impression of it and em-
brace it with greater vehemence and appro-
bation, than we do in our colder and more
temperate senses. You give your counsel a
simple brief of your cause; he returns you a
dubious and uncertain answer: you feel that
he is indifferent which side he takes: have
you fee'd him well that he may consider it
the better? does he begin to be really con-
cerned? and do you find him truly interested
and zealous in your quarrel? His reason and
learning wUl by degrees grow hot in your
cause; a manifest and undoubted truth pre-

MONTAIGNE 207

sents itself to his understanding; he discovers
an altogether new light in your business, and
does in good earnest believe and persuade
himself that it is so. Nay, I do not know
whether the ardor that springs from spite and
obstinacy, against the power and violence of
the magistrate and danger, or the interest of
reputation, may not have made some men,
even to the stake, maintain the opinion for
which, at liberty and amongst friends, he
would not have burned the tip of his finger.
The shocks and jostles that the soul receives
from the passions of the body can do much in
it, but its own can do a great deal more; to
the which it is so subjected that, per ad ven-
ture, it may be established that it has no
other pace and motion but from the breath of
those winds, without the agitation of which it
would be becalmed and without action, like
a ship in the open sea, to which the winds
have denied their assistance: and whoever
should maintain this, siding with the Peri-
patetics, would do us no great wrong, seeing
it is very well known that most of the finest
actions of the soul proceed from and stand
in need of this impulse of the passions; valor.

208 MONTAIGNE

they say, cannot be perfect without the as-
sistance of anger: —

**Ajax was always brave, but bravest when
in frenzy,**

neither do we encounter the wicked and the
enemy vigorously enough if we be not angry;
nay, the advocate has to inspire the judges
with anger to obtain justice.

Strong desires moved Themistocles, moved
Demosthenes, and have pushed on the philo-
sophers to work, watching, and pilgrimages;
they lead us to honor, learning, health, all
very useful ends: and this weakness of the
soul in suffering anxiety and trouble serves
to breed in the conscience penitence and re-
pentance, and to make us see in the scourge
of God and political troubles the chastisement
of our offences. Compassion is a spur to
clemency; and prudence to preserve and
govern ourselves is aroused by our fear; and
how many brave actions have been bom of
ambition? how many by presumption? In a
word, there is no eminent and sprightly virtue
without some irregular agitation. Should not
this be one of the reasons that moved the

MONTAIGNE 209

Epicureans to discharge God from all care
and solicitude of our affairs, because even
the effects of His goodness could not be ex-
ercised in our behalf, without disturbing His
repose, by the means of passions, which are
so many spurs and instruments pricking on
the soul to virtuous actions? or have they
thought otherwise, and taken them for
tempests that shamefully hurry the soul from
her tranquillity? —

**As it is understood to be a calm at sea
when there is not the least breath of air
stirring, so the state of the soul is discerned
to be quiet and appeased when there is no
perturbation to move it."

What varieties of sense and reason, what
contrarieties of imaginations, do the diversi-
ties of our passions present to us? What as*
surance, then, can we take of a thing so
mobile and unstable, subject, by its condi-
tions, to the dominion of trouble, and never
going other than a forced and borrowed pace?
If our judgment be in the power even of sick-
ness and perturbation; if it be from craze
and temerity that it has to receive the im-

210 MONTAIGNE

pression of things, what security can we ex-
pect from it!

Is it not a great boldness in philosophy to
believe that men perform the greatest actions,
those nearest approaching the divinity, when
they are furious, mad, and beside themselves!
we are to better ourselves by the deadening
and privation of our reason; the two natural
ways to enter into the cabinet of the gods,
and there to foresee the course of destiny,
are fury and sleep: this is pleasant to con-
sider; by the dislocation that passions cause
in our reason, we become virtuous; by its ex-
tirpation, occasioned by fury, or the image
of death, we become diviners and prophets.
I was never so willing to believe philosophy
in anything as in this. *Tis a pure enthusiasm
wherewith sacred truth has inspired the spirit
of philosophy, which makes it confess, con-
trary to its own proposition, that the most
calm, composed, and healthful estate of the
soul that philosophy can seat it in, is not its
best condition: our wisdom is less wise than
folly: our dreams are worth more than our
meditation: the worst place we can take is
in ourselves. But does not philosophy think

MONTAIGNE 211

that we are wise enough to remark that the
voice that the spirit utters, when dismissed
from man, so clear-sighted, so grand, so per-
fect, and, whilst it is in man, so terrestrial,
ignorant, and obscure, is a voice proceeding
from the spirit which is in obscure, terres-
trial, and ignorant man, and, for this reason,
a voice not to be trusted and believed?

I have no great experience of these
vehement agitations, being of a soft and
heavy complexion, the most of which surprise
the soul on a sudden, without giving it leisure
to recollect itself: but the passion that is
said to be produced by idleness in the hearts
of young men, though it proceed leisurely
and with a measured progress, evidently
manifests to those who have tried to oppose
its power, the violence our judgment suffers
in the alteration and conversion. I have for-
merly attempted to withstand and repel it;
for I am so far from being one of those who
invite vices, that I do not so much as follow
them, if they do not haul me along: I per-
ceived it to spring, grow, and increase in
despite of my resistance, and at last, living
and seeing as I was, wholly to seize and pos-

212 MONTAIGNE

sess me, so that, as if newly roused from
drunkenness, the images of things began to
appear to me quite other than they were
wont to be; I evidently saw the person I de-
sired, grow and increase in advantages of
beauty, and to expand and develop fairer by
the influence of my imagination; the diflScul-
ties of my pursuit to grow more easy and
smooth; and both my reason and conscience
to be laid aside; but, this fire being evapor-
ated, in an instant, as from a flash of light-
ning, I was aware that my soul resumed
another kind of sight, another state, and
another judgment; the difficulties of retreat
appeared great and invincible, and the same
things had quite another taste and aspect
than the heat of desire had presented them
to me. Which of these most probably?
Pyrrho himself knows nothing about it. We
are never without sickness: fevers have their
hot and cold fits ; from the effects of an ardent
passion we fall into a shivering passion; as
far as I had advanced, so much I retired: —

"As when the sea, rolling with alternate
tides, now rushes on the land and foaming
throws over the rocks its waves, and with

MONTAIGNE 213

its skirts overflows the extremity of the
strand: now, with rapid motion, and suck-
ing in the stones, rolled back with the tide
in its retreat, and with the ebbing current
leaves the shore.*'

Now, from the knowledge of this volubility
of mine, I have accidentally begot in myself
a certain constancy of opinion, and have not
much altered those that were :first and natural
in me : for what appearance soever there may
be in novelty, I do not easily change, for fear
of losing by the bargain: and since I am not
capable of choosing, I take other men's
choice, and keep myself in the state wherein
God has placed me; I could not otherwise
prevent myself from perpetual rolling. Thus
have I, by the grace of God, preserved myself
entire, without anxiety or trouble of con-
science, in the ancient belief of our religion,
amidst so many sects and divisions as our
age has produced. The writings of the
ancients, the best authors I mean, being full
and solid, tempt and carry me which way
almost they will: he that I am reading, seems
always to have the most force, and I find that
every one of them in turn has reason, though

214 MONTAIGNE

they contradict one another. The facility
that good wits have of rendering everything
they would recommend likely, and that there
is nothing so strange to which they will not
imdertake to give color enough to deceive
such a simplicity as mine, this evidently
shows the weakness of their testimony. The
heavens and the stars have been three
thousand years in motion; all the world were
of that belief till Cleanthes the Samian, or,
according to Theophrastus, Nicetas of Syra-
cuse, bethought him to maintain that it was
the earth that moved, turning about its axis
by the oblique circle of the zodiac; and in
our time Copernicus has so grounded this
doctrine, that it very regularly serves to all
astrological consequences: what use can we
make of this, except that we need not much
care which is the true opinion? And who
knows but that a third, a thousand years
hence, may overthrow the two former! —

**Thus revolving time changes the seasons
of things; that which was once in estimation
becomes of no reputation at all, while another
thing succeeds and bursts forth from con-
tempt, is daily more sought, and, when found,

MONTAIGNE 215

flourishes among mankind with praises and
wonderful honor. ' '

So that when any new doctrine presents itself
to us, we have great reason to mistrust it, and
to consider that before it was set on foot the
contrary had been in vogue; and that as that
has been overthrown by this, a third inven-
tion in time to come may start up which may
knock the second on the head. Before the
principles that Aristotle introduced were in
reputation, other principles contented human
reason, as these satisfy us now. What let-
ters-patent have these, what particular privi-
lege, that the career of our invention must be
stopped by them, and that to them should
appertain for all time to come the possession
of our belief? They are no more exempt from
being thrust out of doors than their predeces-
sors were. When any one presses me with a
new argument, I ought to consider that what
I cannot answer, another may : for to believe
all likelihoods that a man cannot himself
confute is great simplicity; it would by that
means come to pass that all the vulgar, and
we are all of the vulgar, would have their be-
lief as tumable as a weathercock: for the

216 MONTAIGNE

soul, being so easily imposed upon and with-
out resisting power, would be forced inces-
santly to receive other and other impressions,
the last still effacing all footsteps of that
which went before. He that finds himself
weak, ought to answer as in law questions,
that he will speak with his counsel; or will
refer himself to the wise from whom he re-
ceived his teaching. How long is it that
physic has been practised in the world! 'Tia
said that a new comer, called Paracelsus,
changes and overthrows the whole order of
ancient rules, and maintains that till now it
has been of no other use but to kill men. I be-
lieve that he will easily make this good; but
I do not think it were wisdom to venture my
life in making trial of his new experiments.
"We are not to believe every one, says the
precept, because every one can say all things.
A man of this profession of novelties and
physical reformations, not long since told me
that all the ancients were notoriously mis-
taken in the nature and motions of the winds,
which he would evidently demonstrate to me,
if I would give him the hearing. After I
had with some patience heard his arguments,

MONTAIGNE 917,

which were all full of likelihood of truth:
''What then," said I, '^did those that sailed
according to Theophrastus, make way west-
ward when they had the prow towards the
east! did they go sideward or backward?"
"That was according to fortune," answered
he; "but be that as it may, they were mis-
taken." I then replied that I had rather
follow effects than reason. Now these things
often clash, and I have been told that in
geometry, which pretends to have gained the
highest point of certainty among all the
sciences, there are found inevitable demon-
strations that subvert the truth of all experi-
ence: as Jacques de Pelletier told me at my
own house, that he had found out two lines
stretching themselves one towards the other
to meet, which, nevertheless, he aflfirmed,
though extended to all infinity, could never
reach to touch one another. And the
Pyrrhonians make no other use of their argu-
ments and their reason than to ruin the
appearance of experience; and 'tis a
wonder how far the suppleness of our rea-
son has followed them in this design of con-
troverting the evidence of effects: for they

218 MONTAIGNE

affirm that we do not move, that we do not
speak, and that there is neither weight nor
heat, with the same force of argimient, that
we affirm the most likely things. Ptolemy,
who was a great man, had established the
bomids of this world of ours: all the ancient
philosophers thought they had the measure of
it, excepting some remote isles that might es-
cape their knowledge; it had been Pyrrhon-
ism, a thousand years ago, to doubt the
science of cosmography, and the opinions
that every one had thence received: it was
heresy to believe in Antipodes; and behold!
in this age of ours there is an infinite extent
of terra firma discovered, not an island or a
particular country, but a part very nearly
equal in greatness to that we knew before.
The geographers of our times stick not to
assure us, that now all is found, all is seen: —

"For what is present pleases, and seems to
prevail."

But the question is whether, if Ptolemy was
therein formerly deceived, upon the founda-
tions of his reason, it were not very foolish
to trust now in what these later people say:

MONTAIGNE 219

and whether it is not more likely that this
great body, which we call the world, is not
quite another thing than what we imagine.

Plato says that it changes its aspect in all
respects; that the heavens, the stars, and
the snn have all of them sometimes motions
retrograde to what we see, changing east into
west. The Egyptian priests told Herodotus,
that from the time of their first king, which
was eleven thousand and odd years before
(and they showed him the effigies of all their
kings in statues taken from the life), the sun
had four times altered his course: that the
sea and the earth alternately change into one
another: that the beginning of the world is
undetermined: Aristotle and Cicero both say
the same; and one amongst us is of opinion
that it has been from all eternity, is mortal,
and renewed again by successive vicissitudes,
calling Solomon and Isaiah to witness: and
this to evade these objections that God has
once been a creator without a creature; that
He had had nothing to do ; that He abandoned
this idleness by putting His hand to this
work; and that, consequently, He is subject
to changes. In the most famous of the Greek

220 MONTAIGNE

schools, the world is taken for a god, made
by another god greater than he, and is com-
posed of a body, and of a soul fixed in his
centre, and dilating himself, by musical num-
bers, to his circumference: divine, infinitely
happy, infinitely great, infinitely wise, and
eternal: in him are other gods, the sea, the
earth, the stars, who entertain one another
with a harmonious and perpetual agitation
and divine dance: sometimes meeting, some-
times retiring; concealing, discovering them-
selves ; changing their order, one while before,
and another behind. Heraclitus was positive
that the world was composed of fire, and, by
the order of destiny, was one day to be en-
flamed and consumed in fire, and then to be
again renewed. And Apuleius says of men: —

''That they are mortal in particular, and
immortal in general.'*

Alexander wrote to his mother the narra-
tion of an Egyptian priest, drawn from their
monuments, testifying the antiquity of that
nation to be infinite, and comprising the birth
and progress of other countries. Cicero and
Diodorus say, that in their time, the Chal-

MONTAIGNE 221

deans kept a register of four Imndred
thousand and odd years : Aristotle, Pliny, and
others, that Zoroaster flourished six thousand
years before Plato's time. Plato says that
they of the city of Sais have records in writ-
ing of eight thousand years, and that the city
of Athens, was built a thousand years before
the said city of Sais. Epicurus, that at the
same time things are here as we see them,
they are alike and in the same manner in
several other worlds; which he would have
delivered with greater assurance had he seen
the similitudes and concordances of the new
discovered world of the West Indies, with
ours present and past, in so many strange
examples.

In earnest, considering what has arrived
at our knowledge from the course of this
terrestrial polity, I have often wondered to
see in so vast a distance of places and times
such a concurrence of so great a number of
popular and wild opinions, and of savage
manners and beliefs, which by no tendency
seem to proceed from our natural meditation.
Human wit is a great worker of miracles. But
this relation has in it circumstances especially

222 MONTAIGNE

extraordinary; 'tis found to be in names also
and a thousand other things: for they dis-
covered nations there that, for aught we
know, never heard of us, where circumcision
was in use : where there were states and great
civil governments maintained by women
only, without men; where our fasts and Lent
were represented, to which was added the
abstinence from women: where our crosses
were several ways in repute: here they were
made use of to honor and adorn their sepul-
tures; there they were erected, and notably
that of St. Andrew, to protect people from
nocturnal visions, and to lay upon the cradles
of infants against enchantments; elsewhere
there was found one of wood, of very great
stature, which was adored as the god of rain,
and this a long way into the main land, and
there was also seen an express image of our
shriving-priests, with the use of mitres, the
celibacy of the priesthood, the art of divina-
tion by the entrails of sacrificed beasts,
abstinence from all sorts of flesh and fish in
their diet, the custom of priests oflSciating in
a particular and not the vulgar language : and
this fancy, that the first god was expelled by

MONTAIGNE 223

a second, his younger brother: that men were
created with all sorts of conveniences, which
have since been taken from them for their
sins, their territory changed, and their
natural condition made worse : that they were
of old overwhelmed by the inundation of
waters' frt)m heavfen; that bujt few families es-
caped, who retired into the caves of high
mountains, the mouths of which they stopped
so that the waters could not get in, having
shut up, together with themselves, sevieral
sorts of animals; that when they perceived
the r^in to cease-, they sent out dogs, which
returning clean and wet, they judged that
the water was not much abated; afterward,
sending out others, and seeing them return
dirty, they issued out to repeople the world,
which thjey found only full of serpents. In
one place some found the persuasion of a day
of judgment, insomuch that the people were
marvellously displeased with the Spaniards
for disturbing the bones of the dead in rifling
the sepultures for riches, saying that those
bones, so disordered, could not easily rejoin;
traffic by exchange, and no other way; fairs
and markets for that end; dwarfs and de-

224 MONTAIGNE

formed people for the ornament of the tables
of princes; the use of falconry, according to
the naturiB of their hawks; tyrannical sub-
sidies; great refinements in gardens; dances,
tumbling tricks, music of instruments, coats
of arms, tennis-courts, dice and game of
hazard, wherein they are sometimes so eager
and hot, as to stake and play themselves and
their liberty; physic, no otherwise than by
charms; the way of writing in cypher; the
belief of only one fir^t man, the father of all
nations; the adoration of a god, who formerly
lived a man in perfect virginity, fasting and
penitence, preaching the law of Nature and
the ceremonies of nsligion, and who vanished
from the world without a natural death; the
belief in giants; the custom of making them-
selves drunk with their beverages and drink-
ing to the utmost; religious ornaments painted
with bones and deajd men's skulls; surplices,
holy water sprinkling; wives and servants
who present themselves with emulation to
be burned and interred with the dead husband
or master; a Ijaw by which the eldest succeeds
to all the estate, no other portion being left
for the younger but obedience; the custom that

MONTAIGNE 225

upon promotion to a certain office of great
authority, the promoted is to take upon him
a new name and to leave that he had before:
another, to strew lime upon the knee of the
new-bom child, with these words, ''From
dust thou camest, and to dust thou must re-
turn:" the art of augury. These vain shadows
of our religion, which are observable in some
of these examples, are testimonies of its
dignity and divinity; not only has it in some
sort insinuated itself into all the infidel
nations on this side of the world, by a certain
imitation, but into these barbarians also, as
by a common and supernatural inspiration;
for we found there the belief of purgatory,
but of a new form ; that which we give to the
fire they give to the cold, and imagine that
souls are both purged and punished by the
rigor of an excessive coldness. And this ex-
ample puts me in mind of another pleasant
diversity: for as there were, on the one hand,
found people who took a pride to unmuffle the
glans of their members, and clipped off the
prepuce after the Mahommedan and Jewish
manner, there were others who made so great
a scruple about laying it bare, that they care-

226 MONTAIGNE

fully pursed it up with little strings to keep
that end from peeping into the air; and of
this other diversity, that whereas we, to
honor kings and festivals, put on the best
clothes we have, in some of these regions, to
express their disparity and submission to
their king, his subjects present themselves
before him in their vilest habits, and, enter-
ing his palace, throw some old tattered gar-
ment over their better apparel, to the end
that all the lustre and ornament may solely
remain in him. But to proceed.

If Nature enclose within the bounds of her
ordinary progress, as well as all other things,
the beliefs, judgments, and opinions of men:
if they have their revolution, their season,
their birth and death, like cabbages; if the
heavens agitate and rule them at their
pleasure, what magisterial and permanent au-
thority are we to attribute to them? If we
experimentally see that the form of our being
depends upon the air, upon the climate, and
upon the soil where we are bom, and not only
the color, the stature, the complexion, and the
countenances, but moreover the very faculties
of the soul itself: —

MONTAIGNE 227

*'The climate is of great efficacy, not only
to the strength of bodies, but to that of minds
also,"

says Vegetius; and that the goddess who
founded the city of Athens chose to situate it
in a temperature of air fit to make men sharp,
as the Egyptian priests told Solon: —

*'At Athens the air is thin; whence also
the Athenians are reputed to be more acute:
at Thebes more thick, therefore the Thebans
are looked upon as fatter-headed and stronger
of body,"

so that as fruits and animals are bom differ-
ing, men should also be bom more or less
warlike, just, temperate, and docile; here
given to wine, elsewhere to theft or lechery;
here inclined to superstition, elsewhere to
misbelief; in one place to liberty, in another
to servitude; capable of one science or of
one art; dull or ingenious, obedient or mutin-
ous, good or ill, according as the place where
they are seated inclines them; and assume a
new complexion, if removed like trees : which
was the reason why Cyrus would not grant
the Persians leave to quit their rough and

228 MONTAIGNE

craggy country to remove to another more
pleasant and level, saying, that soft and
fertile soils made men effeminate and un-
fertile. 11 we see one while one art, one be-
lief flourish, and another while another,
through some celestial influence: such an age
produce such natures and incline mankind in
such and such a direction: the spirits of men
one while gay and another grum, like our
fields: what becomes of all those fine preroga-
tives we so soothe ourselves with? Seeing
that a wise man may be mistaken, a hundred
men, a hundred nations, nay, that even human
nature itself, as we believe, is many ages wide
in one thing or another, what assurance have
we that she sometimes is not mistaken, or not
in this very age of ours?

Methinks, amongst other testimonies of our
imbecility, this ought not to be forgotten, that
man cannot, by his own wish and desire, find
out what is necessary for him; that, not in
fruition only, but in imagination and wish,
we cannot agree about what we would have
to content us. Let us leave it to our thought
to cut out and make up at its pleasure : it can-
not so much as covet what is proper for it,
and satisfy itself: —

MONTAIGNE 229

''For what with reason do we fear or wish!
What is there dexterously conceived that
afterwards you do not repent, both the at-
tempt and even the success!"

And therefore it was that Socrates begged
nothing of the gods but what they knew to be
best for him ; and the, both private and pub-
lic, prayers of the Lacedaemonians were only
simply to obtain good and useful things, re-
ferring the choice and selection of these to
the discretion of the Supreme Power: —

"We seek marriage and the lying-in of
the wife; but it is known to them (the gods)
what the children and wife will be;"

and Christians pray to God ''that His will
may be done:" that they may not fall into the
inconvenience the poets feign of King Midas.
He prayed to the gods that all he touched
might be turned into gold; his prayer was
heard; his wine was gold, his bread was gold,
the feathers of his bed, his shirt and clothes
were all turned into gold, so that he found
himself overwhelmed under the fruition of
his desire, and enriched with an intolerable

230 MONTAIGNE

commodity, and was fain to nnpray his
prayers: —

"Astonished at the strangeness of the evil,
at once rich and wretched, he wishes now to
escape wealth, and hates the thing for which
iie had just prayed."

To instance in myself: when young, I de-
sired of fortune above all things the order of
St. Michael, which was then the utmost dis-
tinction of honor amongst the French
noblesse, and very rare. She pleasantly
gratified my longing; instead of raising me
and lifting me up from my own place to at-
tain it, she was much kinder to me, for she
brought it so low and and made it so cheap
that it stooped down to my shoulders, and
lower. Cleobis and Biton, Trophonius and
Agamedes, having requested, the first of their
goddess, the last of their god, a recompense
worthy of their piety, had death for a re-
ward; so differing are the heavenly opinions
concerning what is fit for us from our own.
God might grant us riches, honors, life, and
health itself, sometimes to our hurt; for
everything that is pleasing to us is not always

MONTAIGNE 231

good for us. If he send us death or an in-
crease of sickness, instead of a cure: —

<<Thy rod and thy staff have comforted
me."

He does it by the reasons of His providence,
which better and more certainly discerns
what is proper for ns than we can do ; and we
ought to take it in good part, as coming from
a wise and most friendly hand:

**If you wish advice, you will let the gods
consider what is useful for us and our affairs,
for man is dearer to them than he is to him-
self:'»

for to require from them honors or com-
mands is to ask them to throw you into a
battle, set you upon a cast at dice, or some-
thing of the like nature, whereof the issue
is to you unknown and the fruit doubtful.

There is no so sharp and violent dispute
amongst the philosophers, as about the ques-
tion of the sovereign good of man; out of
which, by the calculation of Varro, there
arose two hundred and four score and eight
sects : —

232 MONTAIGNE

"For whoever enters into controversy con-
cerning the supreme good, disputes upon the
whole reason of philosophy.**

"Three guests of mine wholly differ, each
man's palate requiring something that the
others do not like. What am I to give!
What not give! You refuse what the others
desire: what you seek the two others say is
odious and sour:*'

nature should say the same to their contests
and debates. Some say that our well-being
lies in virtue, others in pleasure, others in
our submitting to nature; one in knowledge,
another in being exempt from pain; another,
in not suffering ourselves to be carried away
by appearances : and this fancy seems to have
relation to that of the ancient Pythagoras : —

*'Not to admire is all the art I know,

To make men happy, and to keep them so;"

which is the point of the Pyrrhonian sect:
Aristotle attributes the wondering at nothing
to magnanimity, and Archesilaus said, that
constancy and a right and inflexible state of
judgment were the true goods, consent and

MONTAIGNE 233

application vices and evils; it is true that in
being thus positive and establishing it by
certain axiom, he quitted Pyrrhonism; for the
Pyrrhonians, when they say that Ataraxy,
which is the immobility of the judgment, is
the sovereign good, do not design to say it
affirmatively; but the same motion of the
soul which makes them avoid precipices and
take shelter from the evening damp, presents
to them this fancy, and makes them refuse
another.

How much do I wish, that whilst I live,
either some other, or Justus Lipsius, the most
learned man now living, of a most polished
and judicious understanding, truly resemb-
ling my Tumebus, had the will and health
and leisure sufficient candidly and carefully
as possible to collect into a register, accord-
ing to their divisions and classes, the opinions
of ancient philosophy on the subject of our
being and our manners; their controversies,
the succession and reputation of the parts,
the application of the lives of the authors
and their disciples to their own precepts on
memorable and exemplary occasions: what a
beautiful and useful work that would be!

234 MONTAIGNE

To continue: if it be from ourselves that
we are to extract the rules of our manners,
upon what a confusion are we thrown? for
that which our reason advises us to as the
most probable, is generally for every one to
obey the laws of his country, as was the
advice of Socrates, inspired, he tells us, by a
divine counsel; and thence what results but
that our duty has no other rule than what is
accidental? Truth ought to have a like and
universal visage: if man could know equity
and justice that had a body and a true being,
he would not fetter it to the conditions of
this country or that; it would not be from
the whimsies of the Persians or Indians that
virtue would receive its form. There is noth-
ing more subject to perpetual agitation than
the laws: since the time that I was bom, I
have known those of the English, our neigh-
bors, three or four times changed, not only in
matters of civil regimen, which is that
wherein constancy may be dispensed with, but
in the most important subject that can be,
namely, religion: at which I am the more
troubled and ashamed, because it is a nation
with which those of my province have for-

MONTAIGNE 235

merly had so great familiarity and acquaint-
ance, that there yet remain in my house some
traces of our ancient kindred. And here with
us at home, I have known a thing, that was a
capital offence become lawful; and we who
hold others to it, are likewise, according to
the chances of war, in a possibility of being
found one day guilty of high treason, both
divine and human, should ever justice fall
into the power of injustice, and, after a few
years' possession, taking a quite contrary
being. How could that ancient god more
clearly accuse the ignorance of human knowl-
edge concerning the Divine being, and give
men to understand that their religion was
but a thing of their own contrivance, useful
to bind their society, than declaring as he
did to those who came to his tripod for in-
struction, ''that every one's true worship
was that which he found in use in the place
where he chanced to be?" 0 God, what in-
finite obligation have we to the benignity of
our sovereign Creator, for having disabused
our belief from these wandering and arbi-
trary devotions, and for having seated it upon
the eternal foundation of His Holy Word?

236 MONTAIGNE

What will, then, philosophy say to us in this
necessity? Why, "that we follow the laws
of our country," that is to say, that floating
sea of the opinions of a republic or a prince
that will paint justice for me in as many
colors and reform it as many ways as there
are changes of passion in themselves: I can-
not suffer my judgment to be so flexible.
What kind of goodness is that which I see
to-day in repute, and that to-morrow shall be
in none, and which the crossing of a river
makes a crime? What truth is it that these
mountains enclose, and which is a lie in the
world beyond them?

But they are pleasant, when to give some
certainty to the laws, they say that there
are some firm, perpetual and immutable,
which they call natural, that are imprinted in
mankind by the condition of their own proper
being; and of these, some reckon up three,
some four, some more, and some less, a sign
that it is a mark as doubtful as the rest. Now
they are so unfortunate (for what can I call it
else but misfortune, that of so infinite a num-
ber of laws there should not be found one at
least that fortune and the temerity of chance

MONTAIGNE 237

has suffered to be universally received by the
consent of all nations) 1 — they are, I say, so
miserably unfortunate, that of these three or
four select laws there is not so much as one
that is not contradicted and disowned, not
only by one nation but by many. Now the
only likely sign by which they can argue or
infer some laws to be natural is the univer-
sality of approbation; for we should, with-
out doubt, follow by common consent that
which nature had really ordained for us ; and
not only every nation, but every particular
man would resent the force and violence that
any one should do him, who would impel him
to anything contrary to this law. Let them
produce me but one of this condition. Prota-
goras and Aristo gave no other essence to
the justice of laws than the authority and
opinion of the legislator; and that, these put
aside, the honest and the good would lose
their qualities, and remain empty names of
indifferent things: Thrasymachus in Plato
is of opinion that there is no other law but
the convenience of the superior. There is not
anything wherein the world is so various as
in laws and customs; such a thing is abomina-

238 MONTAIGNE

ble here, which is elsewhere in esteem, as in
Lacedaemon dexterity in stealing; marriages
within degrees of consanguinity are capi-
tally interdicted amongst us; they are else-
where in honor: —

** *Tis said there are some nations where
mothers marry their sons, fathers their
daughters, and filial duty is enhanced by the
double tie;"

the murder of infants, the murder of fathers,
community of wives, traffic in robberies,
license in all sorts of voluptuousness; in
short, there is nothing so extreme that is not
allowed by the custom of some nation or
other.

It is credible that there are natural laws,
as we see in other creatures, but they are
lost in us; this fine human reason everywhere
so insinuating itself to govern and command,
as to shuffle and confound the face of things,
according to its own vanity and incon-
stancy:—

* 'Therefore nothing is any longer ours;
what I call ours is artificial."

MONTAIGNE 239

Subjects have divers aspects and divers con-
siderations, and from this the diversity of
opinions principally proceeds; one nation
considers a subject in one aspect and stops
there; another takes it in another aspect.

There is nothing of greater horror to be
imagined than for a man to eat his father;
and yet the nations whose custom anciently it
was to do, looked upon it as a testimony of
piety and natural affection, seeking thereby to
give their progenitors the most worthy and
honorable sepulture; storing up in themselves,
and as it were in their own marrow, the
bodies and relics of their fathers; and in
some sort vivifying and regenerating them
by transmutation into their living flesh, by
means of nourishment and digestion: it is
easy to consider what a cruelty and abomina-
tion it must have appeared to men possessed
and embued with this superstition, to throw
their father's remains to the corruption of
the earth and the nourishment of beasts and
worms.

Lycurgus considered in theft the vivacity,
diligence, boldness, and dexterity of purloin-
ing anything from our neighbors, and the

240 MONTAIGNE

utility that redounded to the public that
every one should look more narrowly to the
conservation of what was his own; and be-
lieved that from this double institution of
assailing and defending advantage was to be
made for military discipline (which was the
principal science and virtue to which he
would inure that nation) of greater consider-
ation than the disorder and injustice of tak-
ing another man's goods.

Dionysius the tyrant offered Plato a robe
of the Persian fashion, long, damasked, and
perfumed; Plato refused it, saying that, be-
ing bom a man, he would not willingly dress
himself in woman's clothes; but Aristippus
accepted it, with this answer, that no ac-
coutrement could corrupt a chaste courage.
His friends reproaching him with meanness
of spirit, for laying it no more to heart that
Dionysius had spit in his face: ''Fishermen,'*
said he, ''suffer themselves to be dashed with
the waves of the sea from head to foot to
catch a gudgeon." Diogenes was washing
cabbages, and seeing him pass by: "If thou
couldst live on cabbage," said he, "thou
wouldst not fawn upon a tyrant," to whom

MONTAIGNE 241

Aristippus replied; ''And if thou knewest
how to live amongst men, thou wouldst not be
washing cabbages." Thus reason finds ap-
pearance for divers effects: 'tis a pot with
two ears that a man may take by the right or
left:—

**War, 0 foreign land, thou bringest us;
horses are armed for war, these herds
threaten war: and yet these animals having
long with patience borne the yoke and
yielded to the reins before, there is hope of
peace."

Solon, being importuned by his friends not
to shed powerless and unprofitable tears for
the death of his son: *'It is for that reason
that I the more justly shed them," said he,
** because they are powerless and unprofit-
able." Socrates' wife exasperated her grief
by this circumstance; *'0h, how unjustly do
these wicked judges put him to death!"
"Why," replied he, "hadst thou rather they
should justly execute me?" We have our
ears bored; the Greeks looked upon that as
a mark of slavery. We retire in private to
enjoy our wives; the Indians do it in public.

242 MONTAIGNE

The Scythians immolated strangers in their
temples; elsewhere temples were a refuge; —

"Thence the popular fury, that every
locality hates its neighbors' gods, when it be-
lieves only the gods which it worships itself. ' '

I have heard of a judge who, where he met
with a sharp conflict betwixt Bartolus and
Baldus, and some point discussed with many
contrarieties, wrote in the margin of his note-
book: ''A question for a friend," that is to
say that truth was there so controverted and
confused that in a like cause he might favor
which of the parties he thought fit. 'Twas
only for want of wit that he did not write,
**A question for a friend" throughout; the
advocates and judges of our time find bias
enough in all causes to accommodate them
to what they themselves think fit. In so in-
finite a science, depending upon the authority
of so many opinions, and so arbitrary a sub-
ject, it cannot but be that an extreme con-
fusion of judgments must arise. There is
hardly any suit so clear wherein opinions do
not very much differ; what one court has de-
termined, another determines quite contrary,

MONTAIGNE 243

and itself also contrary at another time. By
this license, which is a marvellous blemish
on the ceremonious authority and lustre of
our justice, we see frequent examples of per-
sons not abiding by decrees, but running from
judge to judge, and court to court, to decide
one and the same cause.

As to the liberty of philosophical opinions
concerning vice and virtue, 'tis not necessary
to be expatiated upon, as therein are found
many opinions that are better concealed than
published to weak minds. Arcesilaus said,
that in fornication it was no matter how or
with whom it was conmaitted: —

"And obscene pleasures, if nature requires,
Epicurus thinks are not to be measured either
by kind, place, or order, but by age and
beauty. Neither are holy loves thought to
be interdicted to the wise men — we are to in-
quire till what age young men are to be
loved."

These two last Stoical quotations, and the re-
proach that Dicaearchus threw in the teeth of
Plato himself upon this account, show how
much the soundest philosophy indulges

244 MOMTAIGNE

license and excess, very remote from common
usage.

Laws derive their authority from posses-
sion and use: 'tis dangerous to trace them
back to their beginning; they grow great and
ennoble themselves, like our rivers, by run-
ning; follow them upward to their source,
'tis but a little spring, scarce discernible,
that swells thus, and thus fortifies itself by
growing old. Do but consult the ancient con-
siderations that gave the first motion to this
famous torrent, so full of dignity, awe and
reverence; you will find them so light and
weak that it is no wonder if these people, who
weigh and reduce everything to reason, and
who admit nothing by authority or upon
trust, have their judgments very remote and
differing from those of the public. It is no
wonder, if people, who take their pattern
from the first image of nature, should in most
of their opinions, swerve from the common
path: as, for example, few amongst them
would have approved of the strict conditions
of our marriages, and most of them have been
for having women in conmion, and without
obligation : they would refuse our ceremonies.

MONTAIGNE 245

Chrysippus said that a philosopher will make
a dozen somersaults without his breeches for
a dozen of olives; he would hardly have ad-
vised Callisthenes to have refused to Hippo-
elides the fair Agarista his daughter, for hav-
ing seen him stand on his head upon a table.
Metrocles let wind a little indiscreetly in dis-
putation in the presence of his school, and
kept himself hid in his own house for shame,
till Crates coming to visit him, and adding to
his consolations and reasons the example of
his own liberty, falling to let wind with him
who should let most, cured him of that
scruple, and withal drew him to his own Stoi-
cal sect, more free than that more reserved
one of the Peripatetics, of which he had been
till then. That which we call decency, not
to dare to do that in public which it is decent
enough to do in private, the Stoics call folly;
and to mince it and be so modest as to con-
ceal and disown what nature, custom, and our
desires publish and proclaim of our actions,
they reputed a vice ; but the others thought it
was to undervalue the mysteries of Venus, to
draw them out of her private temples to ex-
pose them to the view of the people, and that

246 MONTAIGNE

to bring them out from behind the curtain
was to lose them. Modesty is a thing of
weight; secrecy, reserve, circumspection are
parts of esteem: that pleasure does very
rightly when, under the visor of virtue, she
desires not to be prostituted in the open
streets, trodden under foot and exposed to
the public view, wanting the dignity and con-
venience of her private cabinets. Hence some
say that to put down public stews is not only
to disperse fornication into all places that
was assigned to one, but moreover by the
very difficulty to incite idlers to this vice: —

**Thou, Schaevinus, once Aufidia's hus-
band, art now her gallant. He who was once
your rival is now her husband. How is it
that she who now pleases thee, being
another's, did not please thee when thou wert
her husband! Cannot you find your vigor
where you are immolestedf*

This experience diversifies itself in a
thousand examples: —

"Not a man in the whole city, Caecilianus,
would touch your wife gratis, while it was
easy to do so: now that you have set guards

MONTAIGNE 247

upon her, there 's a vast crowd of lovers after
her. You are a clever man.'*

A philosopher being taken in the very act,
and asked what he was doing, coolly replied,
*'I am planting a man:" no more blushing
to be so caught than if they had found him
planting garlic.

It is, I suppose, out of tenderness and re-
spect to the natural modesty of mankind that
a great and religious author is of opinion
that this act is so necessarily bound to
privacy and shame that he cannot persuade
himself there could be any absolute perform-
ance in those impudent embraces of the
Cynics, but that they only made it their busi-
ness to represent lascivious gestures to main-
tain the impudence of their schools' profes-
sion ; and that to eject what shame had with-
held it was afterwards necessary for them to
withdraw into the shade. But he had not
thoroughly examined their debauches: for
Diogenes, playing the beast with himself in
public, wished in the presence of all who saw
him that he could fill his belly by that exer-
cise. To those who asked him why he did

248 MONTAIGNE

not find out a more commodious place to eat
in than the open street, he made answer,
''Because I am hungry in the open street.'*
The women philosophers who mixed with
their sect, mixed also with their persons in
all places without reservation: and Hip-
parchia was not received into Crates ' society
but upon conditions that she should in all
things follow the uses and customs of his rule.
These philosophers set a great price upon
virtue, and renounced all other discipline but
the moral: and yet in all their actions they
attributed the sovereign authority to the elec-
tion of their sage as above the laws, and gave
no other curb to voluptuousness but modera-
tion only, and the conservation of the liberty
of others.

Heraclitus and Protagoras, forasmuch as
wine seemed bitter to the sick and pleasant
to the sound; the rudder crooked in the water
and straight when out, and such like contrary
appearances as are found in subjects, thence
argued that all subjects had in themselves
the causes of these appearances; and that
there wa^ some bitterness in the wine which
had sympathy with the sick man 's taste, and

MONTAIGNE 249

the rudder some bending quality, sympathiz-
ing with him who looks upon it in the water,
and so of all the rest; which is as much as to
say that all is in all things, and, consequently,
nothing in any one, for where all is, there is
nothing.

This opinion put me in mind of the experi-
ence we have, that there is no sense nor aspect
of anything, whether bitter or sweet, straight
or crooked, that human wit does not find
out in the writings it undertakes to rummage
over. Into the simplest, purest, and most
perfect speaking that can possibly be, how
many lies and falsities have we suggested?
What heresy has not there found ground and
testimony sufficient to set forth and defend
itself? 'Tis on this account that the authors
of such errors will never surrender this proof
of the testimony of the interpretation of
words. A person of dignity who would prove
to me by authority the search of the philoso-
pher's stone wherein he was over head and
ears engaged, alleged to me the other day
five or six passages in the Bible upon which
he said he first founded his attempt, for the
discharge of his conscience (for he is a

250 MONTAIGNE

divine); and in truth the invention was not
only amnsing, I5nt, moreover, very well ac-
commodated to the defence of this fine
science.

By this way the reputation of divining
fables is acquired; there is no fortune-teller,
if he have but this authority that people will
condescend to turn over and curiously peep
into all the folds and glosses of his words, but
we may make him, like the Sybils, say what
we will. There are so many ways of inter-
pretation that it will be hard but that, either
obliquely or in a direct line, an ingenious wit
will find out in every subject some air that
will serve for his purpose: therefore 'tis we
find a cloudy and ambitious style in so fre-
quent and ancient use. Let the author but
contrive to attract and busy posterity about
his predictions; which not only his own parts,
but as much or more the accidental favor of
the matter itself, may effect; that, as to the
rest, he express himself foolishly or subtlely,
somewhat obscurely and contradictorily, 'tis
no matter: a number of wits, shaking and
sifting him, will bring out a great many
several forms, either according to his own,

MONTAIGNE 251

or collateral, or contrary to it, wliich will all
redound to his honor: he will see himself en-
riched, by the means of his disciples, like the
regents of colleges by their pupils at Landy.
This is it which has given reputation to many
things of no worth at all; that has brought
several writings into vogue, and given them
the fame of containing all sorts of matter that
can be desired; one and the same thing re-
ceiving a thousand and a thousand images
and various considerations, even as many as
we please.

Is it possible that Homer could design to
say all that they make him say, and that he
devised so many and so various figures as
that divines, lawgivers, captains, philoso-
phers, all sorts of men who treat of sciences,
how variously and oppositely soever, should
cite him, and support their arguments by
his authority, as the sovereign master of all
oflSces, works, and artisans; counsellor-gen-
eral of all enterprises? Whoever has had oc-
casion for oracles and predictions has there
found sufficient to serve his turn. 'Tis won-
derful how many and how admirable con-
currences an intelligent person and a par-

252 MONTAIGNE

ticular friend of mine has there found out in
favor of our religion, and he cannot easily
be put out of the conceit that this was
Homer's design: and yet he is as well ac-
quainted with that author as any man what-
ever of our time; and so what he has found
out there in favor of our religion, many
anciently found there in favor of theirs. Do
but observe how Plato is tumbled and tossed
about: every one ennobling his own opinions
by applying him to himself, makes him take
what side he pleases; they draw him in and
engage him in all the new opinions the world
receives, and make him, according to the
different course of things, differ from him-
self; they make him, according to their sense,
disavow the manners and customs lawful in
his age, because they are unlawful in ours:
and all this with vivacity and power, accord-
ing to the force and sprightliness of the wit
of the interpreter. From the same founda-
tion that Heraclitus and this sentence of his
had, ''that all things have in them those
forms that we discern in them," Democritus
drew a quite contrary conclusion — namely,
"that subjects had nothing at all in them of

MONTAIGNE 253

what we there find;" and, forasmuch as
honey is sweet to one and bitter to another,
he thence argned that it was neither sweet
nor bitter. The Pyrrhonians would say that
they know not whether it is sweet or bitter,
or neither the one nor the other, or both;
for these always gain the highest point
of dubitation. The Cyrenaics held that
nothing was perceptible from without,
and that that only was perceptible
which internally touched us, as grief
and pleasure; acknowledging neither tone nor
color, but certain affections only that we re-
ceive from them, and that man's judgment
had no other seat. Protagoras believed that
**what seemed to every one was true to every
one." The Epicureans lodged all judgment
in the senses, both in the knowledge of things
and in pleasure. Plato would have the judg-
ment of truth, and truth itself, derived from
opinions and the senses, appertain to the
mind and cogitation.

This discourse has put me upon the con-
sideration of the senses, in which lie the
greatest foundation and proof of our ignor-
ance. Whatsoever is known is doubtless

254 MONTAIGNE

known by the faculty of the knower; for see-
ing the judgment proceeds from the opera-
tion of him who judges, 'tis reason that he
perform this operation by his means and will,
not by the constraint of another, as would
happen if we knew things by the power and
according to the law of their essence. Now
all knowledge is conveyed to us by the senses;
they are our masters: —

*'It is the path by which faith finds its way
to enter the human heart and the temple of
the mind:*'

science begins by them, and is resolved into
them. After all, we should know no more
than a stone, if we did not know that there
is sound, odor, light, taste, measure, weight,
softness, hardness, sharpness, color, smooth-
ness, breadth, and depth; these are the plat-
form and principles of all the structure of
our knowledge, and, according to some,
science is nothing else but sensation. He
that could make me contradict the senses
would have me by the throat, he could not
make me go further back; the senses are the
beginning and the end of human knowl-
edge:—

MONTAIGNE 255

"You will find that all knowledge of truth
is first conveyed to the soul by the senses.
The senses cannot be disputed. What can
be held in greater faith than them!"

Attribute to them the least we can, we must
still of necessity grant them this, that it is
by their means and mediation that all our
instruction is directed. Cicero says, that
Chrysippus, having attempted to depreciate
the force and virtue of the senses, presented
to himself arguments and so vehement op-
positions to the contrary, that he could not
satisfy them; whereupon Cameades, who
maintained the contrary side, boasted that
he would make use of the same words and
arguments that Chrysippus had done where-
with to controvert him, and therefore thus
cried out against him: **0 miserable! thy
force has destroyed thee." There can, in
our estimate, be nothing absurd to a greater
degree than to maintain that fire does not
warm, that light does not shine, and that
there is no weight nor solidity in iron, which
are knowledges conveyed to us by the senses;
there is no belief or knowledge in man that
can be compared to that for certainty.

256 MONTAIGNE

The first consideration I have upon the
subject of the senses is, that I make a doubt
whether man is furnished with all natural
senses. I see several animals that live an
entire and perfect life, some without sight,
others without hearing: who knows whether
to us also one, two, or three, or many other
senses, may not be wanting? For if any one
be wanting, our examination cannot discover
the defect. 'Tis the privilege of the senses
to be the utmost limit of our discovery; there
is nothing beyond them that can assist us
in exploration, not so much as one sense in the
discovery of another: —

"Can ears correct the eyes, or eyes the
touch, or can touch be checked by tasting;
or can nose or eyes confute other faculties ? ' '

they all constitute the extremest limits of our
ability: —

''Each has its own special power assigned
to it, and its strength is its own."

It is impossible to make a man, naturally
blind, conceive that he does not see; impos-
sible to make him desire sight, or to regret

MONTAIGNE 257

his defect: for which reason we ought not to
derive any assurance from the soul's being
contented and satisfied with those we have,
considering that it cannot be sensible herein
of its infirmity and imperfection, if there be
any such thing. It is impossible to say any-
thing to this blind man, either by argument
or similitude, that can possess his imagina-
tion with any apprehension of light, color, or
sight; nothing remains behind that can push
on the senses to evidence. Those that are
bom blind, whom we hear to wish they could
see, it is not that they understand what they
desire: they have learned from us that they
want something, that there is something to
be desired that we have which they can name
indeed, and speak of its effects and conse-
quence; but yet they know not what it is, nor
at all apprehend it.

I have seen a gentleman of a good family
who was bom blind, or at least blind from
such an age that he knows not what sight is,
who is so little sensible of his defect that he
makes use, as we do, of words proper for see-
ing, and applies them after a manner wholly
special and his own. They brought him a

258 MONTAIGNE

child to whom he was godfather; having
taken him into his arms: ''Good God," said
he, **what a fine child is this: how beautiful
to look upon, what a pleasant face he has!'*
He will say, like one of us, "This room has
a very fine prospect; it is clear weather; the
sun shines bright;" and, moreover, hunting,
tennis, and butts being our exercises, as he
has heard, he has taken a liking to them,
makes them his exercises, and believes he has
as good a share of the sport as we have; and
will express himself as angry or pleased as
the best of us all, and yet knows nothing of
it but by the ear. One cries out to him,
''Here's a hare," when he is upon some even
plain where he may safely ride; and after-
wards, when they tell him the hare is killed,
he will be as proud of it as he hears others
say they are. He will take a tennis-ball in
his left hand and strike it away with the
racket! he will shoot with a musket at ran-
dom, and is contented with what his people
tell him, that he is over or beside the mark.
Who knows whether all human kind com-
mit not the like absurdity, for want of some
sense, and that through this default the great-

MONTAIGNE 259

est part of the face of things is concealed
from us? What do we know but that the
diflficulties which we find in several works
of nature do not thence proceed! and that
several effects of animals, which exceed our
capacity, are not produced by the faculty of
some sense that we are defective in? and
whether some of them have not by this means
a life more full and entire than ours? We
seize an apple as it were with all our senses:
we there find redness, smoothness, odor, and
sweetness: but it may have other virtues be-
sides these, as drying up or binding, to which
no sense of ours can have any reference. Is
it not likely that there are sentient faculties
in nature that are fit to judge and discern
what we call the occult properties in several
things, as for the loadstone to attract iron;
and that the want of such faculties is the
cause that we are ignorant of the true essence
of such things? 'Tis, peradventure, some
particular sense that gives cocks to under-
stand what hour it is at midnight and when
it grows to be towards day, and that makes
them crow accordingly; that teaches
chickens, before they have any experience of

260 MONTAIGNE

what they are, to fear a sparrow-hawk, and
not a goose or a peacock, though birds of a
much larger size; that cautions them of the
hostile quality the cat has against them, and
makes them not fear a dog; to arm them-
selves against the mewing, a kind of flatter-
ing voice, of the one, and not against the
barking, a shrill and threatening voice, of
the other; that teaches wasps, ants, and rats
to select the best pear and the best cheese,
before they have tasted them, and which in-
spires the stag, the elephant, the serpent, with
the knowledge of a certain herb proper for
their cure. There is no sense that has not a
mighty dominion, and that does not by its
power introduce an infinite number of knowl-
edges. If we were defective in the intelli-
gence of sounds, of harmony, and of the
voice, it would cause an unimaginable con-
fusion in all the rest of our science; for, be-
sides what appertains to the proper effect of
every sense, how many arguments, conse-
quences, and conclusions do we draw as to
other things, by comparing one sense with
another? Let an understanding man imagine

MONTAIGNE 261

human nature originally produced without
the sense of seeing, and consider what ignor-
ance and trouble such a defect would bring
upon him, what a darkness and blindness in
the soul; he will see by that of how great im-
portance to the knowledge of truth the priva-
tion of such another sense, or of two, or
three, should we be so deprived, would be.
We have formed a truth by the consultation
and concurrence of our five senses; but, per-
adventure, we should have the consent and
contribution of eight or ten, to make certain
discovery of it in its essence.

The sects that controvert the knowledge
of man, do it principally by the uncertainty
and weakness of our senses; for since all
knowledge is by their means and mediation
conveyed unto us, if they fail in their report,
if they corrupt or alter what they bring us
from without, if the light which by them
creeps into the soul be obscured in the pas-
sage, we have nothing else to hold by. From
this extreme difficulty all these fancies pro-
ceed ; ' ' that every subject has in itself all we
there find: that it has nothing in it, of
what we think we there find;" and that of

262 MONTAIGNE

the Epicureans, "that the sun is no bigger
than 'tis judged by our sight to be:" —

**But be it what it will, in our esteem, it
is no bigger than it seems to our eyes ; ' '

"that the appearances, which represent a
body great to him that is near, and less to
him that is more remote, are both true:" —

"Yet we deny that the eye is deluded; do
not then charge it with the mind's fault;"

and resolutely, "that there is no deceit in
the senses; that we are to lie at their mercy,
and seek elsewhere reasons to excuse the dif-
ference and contradictions we there find,
even to the inventing of lies and other flams
(they go that length) rather than accuse the
senses." Timagoras vowed that, by press-
ing or turning his eye, he could never per-
ceive the light of the candle to double, and
that the seeming so proceeded from the vice
of opinion, and not from the organ. The most
absurd of all absurdities, according to the
Epicureans, is in denying the force and effect
of the senses: — |j

"Therefore, whatever has to them at any

MONTAIGNE 263

time seemed true, is true, and if our reason
cannot explain why things seem to be square
when near, and at a greater distance appear
round, 'tis better for him that's at fault in
reasoning to give of each figure a false cause,
than to permit manifest things to go out of
his hands, to give the lie to his first belief,
and overthrow all the foundations on which
life and safety depend; for not alone reason,
but life itself will fall together with sudden
ruin, unless we dare trust our senses to avoid
precipices, and other such like dangers that
are to be avoided."

This so desperate and unphilosophical ad-
vice, expresses only this, that human loiowl-
edge cannot support itself but by reason that
is unreasonable, foolish, and mad; but that
it is better that man, to set a greater value
upon himself, should make nse of this or any
other remedy how fantastic soever, than con-
fess his necessary ignorance; a truth so dis-
advantageous to him. He cannot avoid own-
ing that the senses are the sovereign lords of
his knowledge; but they are uncertain and
falsifiable in all circumstances; 'tis there
that he is to fight it out to the last; and if
his just forces fail him, as they do, supply

264 MONTAIGNE

that defect with obstinacy, temerity, and im-
pudence. If what the Epicureans say be
true, viz., * * that we have no knowledge if the
appearances of the senses be false;" and if
that also be true which the Stoics say, ''that
the appearances of the senses are so false
that they can furnish us with no manner of
knowledge," we shall conclude, to the dis-
advantage of these two great dogmatical
sects, that there is no science at all.

As to what concerns the error and uncer-
tainty of the operation of the senses, every
one may furnish himself with as many ex-
amples as he pleases; so ordinary are the
faults and tricks they put upon us. In the
echo of a valley the sound of the trumpet
seems to meet us, which comes from some
place behind: —

"And mountains rising up at a distance
from the middle of the sea, between which
a free passage for ships is open, yet appear,
though far separated, one vast island united
of the two, . . . and the hills and plains, past
which we row or sail, seem to flee away
astern. When a spirited horse sticks fast
with us in the middle of a river, and we look

MONTAIGNE 265

down into the stream, the horse seems to be
carried by its force in a contrary direction,
though he stands still:"

just as a musket bullet under the forefinger,
the middle finger being lapped over it, feels
so like two that a man will have much ado
to persuade himself there is but one, the
senses so vividly representing them as two.
For that the senses are very often masters
of our reason and constrain it to receive im-
pressions which it judges and knows to be
false, is frequently seen. I set aside the sense
of feeling, that has its functions nearer, more
vivid and substantial, that so often by the
effect of the pains it inflicts on the body sub-
verts and overthrows all those fine Stoical
resolutions, and compels him to cry out from
his belly who has resolutely established this
doctrine in his soul, ''that the gout and all
other pains and diseases are indifferent
things, not having the power to abate any-
thing of the sovereign felicity wherein the
sage is seated by his virtue;" there is no
heart so effeminate that the rattle and sound
of our drxmis and trumpets will not enflame
with courage; nor so sullen that the sweet-

266 MONTAIGNE

ness of music will not rouse and cheer; nor
a soul so stubborn that will not feel itself
struck with some reverence in considering
the sombre vastness of our churches, the
variety of ornaments and order of our cere-
monies, and in hearing the solemn music of
our organs, and the grace and devout har-
mony of our voices; even those, who come in
with contempt, feel a certain shivering in
their hearts, and something of dread that
makes them begin to doubt their opinion.
For my part, I do not find myself strong
enough to hear an ode of Horace or Catullus
sung by a beautiful young mouth without
emotion ; and Zeno had reason to say that the
voice is the flower of beauty. Some one once
wanted to make me believe that a certain
person, whom all we Frenchmen know, had
imposed upon me in repeating some verses
that he had made; that they were not the
same upon the paper that they were in the
air, and that my eyes would make a contrary
judgment of them to my ears: so great a
power has pronunciation to give fashion and
value to works that are left to the efficacy
and modulation of the voice. Therefore

MONTAIGNE 267

Philoxenus was not so much to blame who,
hearing one give an ill accent to some com-
position of his, stamped on and broke certain
earthen vessels of his, saying, "I break what
is thine, because thou spoilest what is mine.'*
To what end did those men, who have with
a positive resolution destroyed themselves,
turn away their faces that they might not
see the blow that was by themselves ap-
pointed? and that those who, for their
health, desire and command incisions and
cauteries, cannot endure the sight of the
preparations, instruments, and operations of
the surgeons, seeing that the sight is not in
any way to participate in the pain? — are not
these proper examples to verify the authority
the senses have over the reason? 'Tis to much
purpose that we know these tresses were bor-
rowed from a page or a lacquey; that this red
came from Spain, and that white and polish
from the ocean; our sight will nevertheless
compel us to confess the object more agree-
able and more lovely against all reason; for
in this there is nothing of its own.

'*We are carried away by dress; all things
are hidden by jewels and gold; the girl is of

268 MONTAIGNE

herself the smallest part. Often, when
amongst so many decorations we seek for
her we love, wealthy love deceives our eyes
with this mask.**

What a strange power do the poets attribute
to the senses, who make Narcissus so desper-
ately in love with his own shadow? —

**He admires all things by which he is ad-
mired: silly fellow, he desires himself; the
praises which he gives, he claims; he seeks,
and is sought; he is inflamed and inflames:"

and Pygmalion's judgment so troubled by the
impression of the sight of his ivory statue,
that he loves and adores it, as if it were a
living woman: —

**He kisses, and believes that he is kissed
again, seizes her, embraces her; he thinks
her limbs yield to the pressure of his fingers,
and fears lest they should become black and
blue with his ardor.**

Let a philosopher be put into a cage of
small thin-set bars of iron, and hang him on
the top of the high tower of Notre Dame of
Paris; he will see, by manifest reason, that

MONTAIGNE 269

he cannot possibly fall, and yet he will find,
unless he have been used to the tiler's trade,
that he cannot help but that the excessive
height will frighten and astound him; for
we have enough to do to assure ourselves in
the galleries of our steeples, if they are
railed with an open baluster, although they
are of stone; and some there are that cannot
endure so much as to think of it. Let there
be a beam thrown over betwixt these two
towers, of breadth sufficient to walk upon;
there is no philosophical wisdom so firm that
can give us the courage to walk over it, as
we should do upon the ground. I have often
tried this upon our mountains in these parts,
and though I am not one who am much sub-
ject to be afraid of such things, yet I was not
able to endure to look into that infiinite depth
without horror and trembling in legs and
arms, though I stood above my length from
the edge of the precipice, and could not have
fallen down unless I had chosen. I also
observed that what height soever the preci-
pice were provided there were some
tree or some jutting out of a rock
a little to support and divide the sight, it a

270 MONTAIGNE

little eases our fears and gives some assur-
ance, as if they were things by which in fall-
ing we might have some help ; but that direct
precipices we are not able to look upon with-
out being giddy: —

**Not to be seen without dizziness of the
eyes and mind:"

which is a manifest imposture of the sight.
And therefore it was, that the fine philoso-
pher put out his own eyes to free the soul
from being diverted by them, and that he
might philosophize at greater liberty: but
by the same rule, he should have stopped up
his ears, which Theophrastus says are the
most dangerous instruments about us for re-
ceiving violent impressions to alter and dis-
turb us; and, in short, should have deprived
himself of all his other senses, that is to
say, of his life and being; for they have all
the power to command our soul and reason: —

"For it often falls out that minds are more
vehemently struck by some sight, by the loud
sound of the voice, or by singing, and oft-
times by grief and fear."

MONTAIGNE 271

Physicians hold that there are certain com-
plexions that are agitated by some somids
and instrmnents even to fury. I have seen
some who could not hear a bone gnawed
under the table without impatience; and
there is scarce any man who is not disturbed
at the sharp and shrill noise that the file
makes in grating upon the iron; and so, to
hear chewing near them or to hear any one
speak who has any impediment in the throat
or nose, will move some people even to anger
and hatred. Of what use was that piping
prompter of Gracchus, who softened, raised,
and moved his master's voice whilst he de-
claimed at Rome, if the movements and
quality of the sound had not the power to
move and alter the judgments of the audi-
tory? Truly, there is wonderful reason to
keep such a clutter about the firmness of this
fine piece that suffers itself to be turned and
twined by the motions and accidents of so
light a wind!

The same cheat that the senses put upon
our understanding, they have in turn put
upon them; the soul also sometimes has its
revenge; they lie and contend which should

272 MONTAIGNE

most deceive one another. What we see and
hear when we are transported with passion,
we neither see nor hear as it is: —

**The snn seemed two suns, and Thebes a
double city:"

the object that we love appears to us more
beautiful than it really is: —

**We often see the ugly and the vile held
in highest honor and warmest love:"

and that we hate, more ugly. To a discon-
tented and afflicted man, the light of the day
seems dark and overcast. Our senses are not
only corrupted, but very often utterly stupe-
fied by the passions of the soul; how many
things do we see that we do not take notice
of, if the mind be occupied with other
thoughts ! —

''Nay, as to the most distinct objects, you
may observe that unless the mind take notice
of them, they are no more seen than if they
were far removed in time and distance;"

it seems as though the soul retires within

MONTAIGNE 273

and amnses the powers of the senses. And so
both the inside and the outside of man is full
of infirmities and falsehood.

They who have compared onr life to a
dream were, peradventure, more in the right
than they were aware of. When we dream,
the soul lives, works, exercises all its facul-
ties, neither more nor less than when awake;
hut if more gently and obscurely, yet not so
much certainly, that the difference should be
as great as betwixt night and the meridional
brightness of the sim; nay, as betwixt night
and shade; there she sleeps, here she slum-
bers, but whether more or less, 'tis still dark
and Cimmerian darkness. We wake sleep-
ing, and sleep waking, I do not see so clearly
in my sleep; but as to my being awake, I
never find it clear enough and free from
clouds: moreover, sleep, when it is profound,
sometimes rocks even dreams themselves
asleep ; but our awaking is never so sprightly
that it rightly and thoroughly purges and
dissipates those reveries which are waking
dreams, and worse than dreams. Our rea-
son and soul receiving those fancies and
opinions that come in dreams, and authoriz-

274 MONTAIGNE

ing the actions of our dreams, in like manner
as they do those of the day, why do we not
doubt whether our thought and action is not
another sort of dreaming, and our waking a
certain kind of sleep!

If the senses be our first judges, it is not
our own that we are alone to consult; for in
this faculty beasts have as great or greater,
right than we : it is certain that some of them
have the sense of hearing more quick than
man, others that of seeing, others that of
feeling, others that of touch and taste. Demo-
critus said, that the gods and brutes had the
sensitive faculties much more perfect than
man. Now, betwixt the effects of their
senses and ours, the difference is extreme;
our spittle cleanses and dries up our wounds ;
it kills the serpent: —

**And in those things the difference is so
great that what is one man*s poison is
another man's meat; for the serpent often,
when touched with human spittle, goes mad,
and bites itself to death.*'

What quality do we attribute to our spittle,
either in respect to ourselves or to the ser-

MONTAIGNE 275

pent! by which of the two senses shall we
prove the true essence that we seek? Pliny
says, that there are certain sea-hares in the
Indies that are poison to us, and we to them,
insomuch that with the least touch we kill
them; which shall be truly poison, the man
or the fish? which shall we believe, the fish
of the man, or the man of the fish? One
quality of the air infects a man that does the
ox no harm; some other infects the ox but
hurts not the man; which of the two shall in
truth and nature be the pestilent quality? To
them who have the jaundice all things seem
yellow and paler than to us: —

"Whatever jaundiced eyes view looks yel-
low."

They who are troubled with the disease that
the physicians call hyposphagma, which is a
suffusion of blood under the skin, see all
things red and bloody. What do we know
but that these humors, which thus alter the
operations of sight, predominate in beasts
and are usual with them? for we see some
whose eyes are yellow like onr people who
have the jaundice, and others of a bloody

276 MONTAIGNE

color; to these 'tis likely that the color of
objects seems other than to us; which judg-
ment of the two shall be right? for it is not
said that the essence of things has a rela-
tion to man only: hardness, whiteness, depth,
and sharpness have reference to the service
and knowledge of animals as well as to ns,
and Nature has equally designed them for
their use. When we press down the eye,
the body that we look upon we perceive to
be longer and more extended; many beasts
have their eyes so pressed down: this length
therefore is, peradventure, the true form of
that body, and not that which our eyes give
it in their usual state. If we close the lower
part of the eye, things appear double to us : —

**Two lights in the lamps seem blossoming
with flames, and each man appears to have a
double body and two heads."

If our ears be obstructed or the passage
stopped with anything, we receive the sound
quite otherwise than we usually do; the ani-
mals likewise, who have either the ears hairy
or but a very little hole instead of an ear,
do not, consequently, hear as we do, but

MONTAIGNE 277

another kind of sound. We see at festivals
and theatres that painted glass of a certain
color reflecting the light of the flambeaux,
and all things in the room appear to us
green, yellow, or violet: —

''And thus yellow, red, and purple cur-
tains, stretched over the spacious theatre,
sustained by poles and pillars, wave about
in the air, and whole streams of colors flow
from the top, and tinge the scenes, and men,
and women, and g'ods:"

'tis likely that the eyes of animals, which we
see to be of divers colors, produce the ap-
pearance of bodies to them the same with
their eyes.

We sh/)uld, therefore, to make a right
judgment of the operations of the senses, be
first agreed with beasts; and secondly,
amongst ourselves, which we by no means
are, but enter at every turn into dispute, see-
ing that one man hears, sees, or tastes some-
thing othei*wise than another does; and con-
test as much as upon any other thing about
the diversity of the images that the senses
represent to us. A child, by the ordinary

278 MONTAIGNE

rule of natnre, hears, sees, and tastes other-
wise than a man of thirty years old, and he
than one of threescore ; the senses are in some
more obscure and dusky, and in others more
open and quick. We receive things vari-
ously, according as we are and according as
they appear to us ; now, our perception being
so uncertain and controverted, it is no won-
der if we are told that we may declare that
snow appears white to us, but that to affirm
that it is in its own essence really so, is more
than we are able to justify: and this founda-
tion being shaken, all the knowledge in the
world must of necessity fall to pieces. Then
our senses themselves hinder one another: a
picture seems raised and embossed to the
sight, in the handling it seems flat to the
touch: shall we say that musk, which de-
lights the smell and is offensive to the taste,
is agreeable or no? There are herbs and
unguents proper for one part of the body
that are hurtful to another; honey is pleasant
to the taste, but not pleasant to the sight.
Those rings which are cut in the form of
feathers, and which they call in device pennes
sans fin, the eye cannot determine their size,

MONTAIGNE 279

or help being deceived by the imagination
that on one side they are not larger, and on
the other side become gradually narrower,
and this even when you have them round
the finger; yet when the touch comes to test
them, it finds them of equal size and alike
throughout. They who, to assist their lust,
were wont in ancient times to make use of
magnifying glasses to represent the members
they were to employ larger than they were,
and by ocular tumidity to please themselves
the more: to which of the two senses did
they give the prize, whether to the sight, that
represented the members as large and great
as they would desire, or to the touch, which
presented them little and contemptible? Are
they our senses that supply the subject with
these different conditions, and have the sub-
jects themselves nevertheless but one? as we
see in the bread we eat, it is nothing but
bread, but by being eaten it becomes bones,
blood, flesh, hair, and nails: —

**As meats diffused through all the mem-
bers lose their former nature, and become a
new substance;"

280 MONTAIGNE

the humidity sucked up by the root of a tree,
becomes trunk, leaf, and fruit; and the air,
being but one, is modulated in a trumpet to
a thousand sorts of sounds: are they our
senses, I would fain know, that in like man-
ner form these subjects into so many divers
qualities, or have they them really such in
themselves; and, in the face of this doubt,
what can we determine of their true essence!
Moreover, since the accidents of disease, de-
lirium, or sleep make things appear other-
wise to us than they do to the healthful, the
sane, and those that are awake, is it not likely
that our right posture of health and under-
standing, and our natural humors, have also
wherewith to give a being to things that have
relation to their own condition, and to ac-
commodate them to themselves, as well as
when these humors are disordered; and our
health as capable of giving them its aspect as
sickness? Why has not the temperate a cer-
tain form of objects relative to it, as well as
the intemperate; and why may it not as well
stamp it with its own character as the other?
He whose mouth is out of taste says the wine
is flat; the healthful man commends its

MONTAIGNE 281

flavor, and the thirsty its briskness. Now,
our condition always accommodating things
to itself, and transforming them according
to itself, we cannot know what things truly
are in themselves, seeing that nothing comes
to us but what is falsified and altered by the
senses. Where the compass, the square, and
the rule are crooked, all proportions drawn
from them, all the buildings erected by those
guides, must of necessity be also defective;
the uncertainty of our senses renders every-
thing uncertain that they produce: —

"Denique ut in fabrica, si prava est regula

prima
Normaque si fallax rectis regionibus exit,
Et libella aliqua si ex parti claudicat hilum;
Omnia mendoae fieri atque obstipa necessum

est:
Prava, cubantia, prona, supina, atque absona

tecta:
Jam mere ut quaedam videantur velle,

ruantque
Prodita judiciis fallacibus omnia primis:
Sic igitur ratio tibi rerum prava necesse est,
Falsaque sit, falsis quaecumque a sensibus

ortaest."

And, after all, who can be fit to judge of and

282 MONTAIGNE

to determine these differences? As we say,
in controversies of religion, that we must
have a judge neither inclining to the one side
nor to the other, free from all choice and af-
fection, which cannot be among Christians;
just so it falls out in this; for if he be old,
he cannot judge of the sense of old age, being
himself a party in the case: if young, there
is the same exception; healthful, sick, asleep,
or awake, he is still the same incompetent
judge: we must have some one exempt from
all these qualities, so that without preoccu-
pation of judgment, he may judge of these
propositions as of things indifferent to him;
and, by this rule, we must have a judge that
never was.

To judge of the appearances that we re-
ceive of subjects, we ought to have a judi-
catory instrument; to prove this instrument,
we must have demonstration; to verify this
demonstration, an instrument: and here we
are upon the wheel. Seeing the senses can-
not determine our dispute, being themselves
full of uncertainty, it must be reason that
must do it; but no reason can be established
but upon the foundation of another reason;

MONTAIGNE 283

and so we run back to all infinity. Our fancy
does not apply itself to things that are
foreign, but is conceived by the mediation of
the senses, and the senses do not compre-
hend a foreign subject, but only their own
passions; so that fancy and appearance are
no part of the subject, but only of the pas-
sion and sufferance of the sense; which pas-
sion and subject are several things; where-
fore, whoever judges by appearances, judges
by another thing than the subject. And to
say that the passions of the senses convey to
the soul the quality of external subjects by
resemblance: how can the soul and under-
standing be assured of this resemblance, hav-
ing of itself no communication with the ex-
ternal subjects'? as they who never knew
Socrates cannot, when they see his portrait,
say it is like him. Now, whoever would, not-
withstanding, judge by appearances; if it be
by all, it is impossible, because they hinder
one another by their contrarieties and dis-
crepancies, as we by experience see: shall
some select appearances govern the rest?
You must verify these select by another
select, the second by the third, and, conse-

284 MONTAIGNE

quently, there will never be any end on't.
Finally, there is no constant existence, either
of the objects' being nor of our own: both we
and our judgment, and all mortal things, are
evermore incessantly running and rolling,
and, consequently, nothing certain can be es-
tablished from the one to the other, both the
judging and the judge being in a continual
motion and mutation.

We have no communication with Being, by
reason that all human nature is ever in the
midst, betwixt being bom and dying, giving
but an obscure appearance and shadow, a
weak and uncertain opinion of itself, and if,
peradventure, you fix your thought to appre-
hend your being, it would be like grasping
water; for the more you clutch your hand to
squeeze and hold what is in its own nature
flowing, so much the more you lose what you
would gr£isp and hold. So, seeing that all
things are subject to pass from one change
to another, reason, that there looks for a real
substance, finds itself deceived, not being
able to apprehend anything that is subsistent
and permanent, because that everything is
either entering into being, and is not yet

MONTAIGNE 285

wholly arrived at it, or begins to die before
it is bom. Plato said, that bodies had never
any existence, not even birth ; conceiving that
Homer had made the ocean and Thetis father
and mother of the gods, to show us that all
things are in a perpetual fluctuation, motion
and variation: the opinion of all the philoso-
phers, as he says, before his time, Parmenides
only excepted, who would not allow things to
have motion, on the power whereof he sets
a mighty value. Pythagoras was of opinion
that all matter was flowing and unstable : the
Stoics, that there is no time present, and that
what we call Present is nothing but the junc-
ture and meeting of the future and the past:
Heraclitus, that never any man entered twice
into the same river: Epicharmus, that he
who borrowed money but an hour ago, does
not owe it now; and that he who was invited
overnight to come the next day to dinner,
comes nevertheless uninvited, considering
that they are no more the same men, but are
become others ; and, ' * that there could not be
found a mortal substance twice in the same
condition: for, by the suddenness and quick-
ness of change, it one while disperses and

286 MONTAIGNE

another reassembles ; it comes and goes, after
such a manner, that what begins to be bom
never arrives to the perfection of being, for-
asmuch as that birth is never finished and
never stays as being at an end, but, from the
seed, is evermore changing and shifting from
one to another: as from human seed is first
made in the mother's womb a formless
embryo, then a formed child, then, in due
course, delivered thence a sucking infant:
afterwards it becomes a boy, then a lad, then
a man, then a middle-aged man, and at last a
decrepid old man ; so that age and subsequent
generation are always destroying and spoil-
ing that which went before:" —

"For time changes the nature of the whole
world, and one state gives all things a new
state: nothing remains like itself, but all
things range; nature changes everything."

''And yet we foolishly fear one kind of death,
whereas we have already passed and daily
pass so many others: for not only, as Hera-
clitus said, the death of fire is the generation
of air, and the death of air the generation of
water: but we may still more manifestly dis-

MONTAIGNE 287

cem it in ourselves; the flower of youth dies
and passes away, when age comes on; and
youth is terminated in the flower of age of a
full-grown man, infancy in youth, and the
first age dies in infancy; yesterday died in
to-day, and to-day will die in to-morrow; and
there is nothing that remains in the same
state, or that is always the same thing; and
that it is so let this be the proof; if we are
always one and the same, how comes it then
to pass, that we are now pleased with one
thing, and by and by with another? how
comes it to pass that we love or hate contrary
things, that we praise or condemn them? how
comes it to pass that we have different af-
fections, and no more retain the same senti-
ment in the same thought? For it is not
likely that without mutation we should as-
sume other passions; and that which suffers
mutation does not remain the same, and if
it be not the same, it is not at all: but the
same that the being is, does, like it, unknow-
ingly change and alter, becoming evermore
another from another thing: and, conse-
quently, the natural senses abuse and deceive
themselves, taking that which seems for that

288

MONTAIGNE

which is, for want of well knowing what that
which is, is. But what is it then that tmly
is eternal; that is to say, that never had be-
ginning nor never shall have ending, and to
which time can bring no mutation : for time is
a mobile thing, and that appears as in a
shadow, with a matter evermore flowing and
running, without ever remaining stable and
permanent: and to which those words apper-
tain. Before, and After, Has been, or Shall be :
which, at first sight, evidently show that it
is not a thing that is; and it were a great
folly, and an apparent falsity, to say that
that is, which is not yet in being, or that has
already ceased to be; and as to these words,
Present, Instant, and Now, by which it seems
that we principally support and found the
intelligence of time, reason discovering, pres-
ently destroys it; for it immediately divides
and splits it into the future and past, as, of
necessity, considering it divided in two. The
same happens to nature which is measured, as
to time that measures it: for she has •noth-
ing more subsisting and permanent than the
other, but all things are therein either bom,
or being bom, or dying. So that it were a

MONTAIGNE 289

sinful saying to say of God, who is He who
only is, that He was or that He shall be: for
those are terms of declension, passages and
vicissitude of what cannot continue nor re-
main in being: wherefore we are to conclude
that God only is, not according to any
measure of time, but according to an im-
mutable and motionless eternity, not meas-
ured by time, nor subject to any declension;
before whom nothing was, and after whom
nothing shall be, either more new or more re-
cent, but a real Being, that with one sole
Now fills the Forever, and there is nothing
that truly is, but He alone, without one being
able to say. He has been, or shall be, with-
out beginning, and without end.'*

To this so religious conclusion of a pagan,
I shall only add this testimony of one of the
same condition, for the close of this long and
tedious discourse, which would furnish me
with endless matter. *'0 what a vile and
abject thing, ' ' says he, ' * is man, if he do not
raise himself above humanity?" 'Tis a
good word, and a profitable desire, but
equally absurd; for to make the handful
bigger than the hand, and the armful larger

290 MONTAIGNE

than the arm, and to hope to stride further
than our legs can reach, is impossible and
monstrous; or that man should rise above
himself and humanity: for he cannot see but
with his eyes, nor seize but with his power.
He shall rise if God extraordinarily lends him
His hand; he shall rise by abandoning and
renouncing his own proper means, and by
suffering himself to be raised and elevated
by means purely celestial. It belongs to our
Christian faith, and not to his Stoical virtue,
to pretend to that divine and miraculous
metamorphosis.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES

COLLEGE LIBRARY

This book is due on the last date stamped below.

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